TRANSCRIPT
The three-week youth curfew in Alice Springs has come to an end with the town's mayor Matt Paterson calling the policy - aimed at reducing youth violent crime - a success.
“I think it's been extremely effective and we've seen the community take a breath and we asked for a circuit breaker and it was delivered, and so it has had a hugely positive impact. You can slice it and dice it however you want, and the experts can say that it won't work and X, Y and Z, but I'm telling you right now, I live here, it worked.”
The curfew meant that residents under the age of 18 were not allowed to enter the CBD area between 6pm and 6am.
This followed a brawl at a local pub, the beating of a 16-year-old girl and a number of other crimes within the community that pushed politicians towards the extreme measure.
However, a number of First Nations residents have criticised the NT government's lack of community consultation prior to the curfew, while calling the move a temporary fix at best.
18-year-old Alice Springs woman Shanaya McAdam-Bray says she'd like to see a focus on more long-term solutions.
“It's not really addressing the problem in Alice Springs, because obviously when the curfew's done stuff, everything's going to go back to normal. So it's just a band-aid at the moment. They need to come up with a real solution or at least some other ideas to help actually get to the core of the issue with the youth and the crime and everything like that.”
Blair McFarland is the 2024 Northern Territory Australian of the Year and has worked in the crime and justice sphere for 40 years.
He says the curfew is just one more example of the failure of governments to address the root causes of crime in his home of Alice Springs.
“If you wanted to solve the problems in central Australia, you'd address the root causes of these problems, not the symptoms, not the alcohol abuse and not the kids on the street and not the crime. You'd look at the actual root causes of these problems, which is primarily poverty. If you wanted to address poverty, there are some levers that the government has absolutely got right now that it could use and it used during COVID and it used in various other times that could reduce the poverty in remote communities tomorrow, like tomorrow literally. But everyone's going, oh, it's a multi-generational blah, blah, blah, but that's just an excuse for inaction as far as I'm concerned.
As the youth curfew ends, the NT government has reassigned 25 police officers to be stationed in Alice Springs until the end of June to provide additional support to local law enforcement.
While this brings a peace of mind to many in the community, for some First Nations residents the feeling is more complicated.
This comes amid an ongoing joint investigation by the NT Police Force and the NT's Independent Commissioner Against Corruption into allegations of racism within the force and while a coronial inquest into the police killing of 19-year-old Kumanjayi Walker remains in progress.
Ms McAdam-Bray says negative experiences with police officers have made First Nations people less likely to reach out when in danger.
“The police presence over the last two weeks of the curfew has been a lot more than I've seen in Alice Springs for a very long time. So, it has been very intimidating I would say. Especially with the deaths in custody and police brutality. It's the feeling that you can't trust police and they're not really there to protect and serve. It's very intimidating when you have to interact with the police or a simple thing of calling the police and talking to the police officers because you don't know how they'll treat you based off the colour of your skin or your race."
Nick Espie, special counsel for the Human Rights Law Centre and an Arrente man says this attitude towards police is very common.
“Look for many Aboriginal people, there's an inherent fear and apprehension when it comes to police. Sadly, a lot of Aboriginal people are exposed to negative interactions with police, either from their own interactions or those of family members. And this is what happens if we continue to only utilise police as the face of any response to the community safety issues. We can't just arrest our way out of any sort of social crisis.”
For First Nations NT residents, this distrust of authority is largely rooted in past institutional violence as well as historic policies that have seen their freedoms infringed upon.
This was seen in 2007 with the Northern Territory National Emergency Response, otherwise known as the "The Intervention", which was introduced by the Howard government and amended and updated by the Rudd and Gillard governments.
The suite of measures were intended to combat child sexual abuse in the NT and included banning the consumption of alcohol and pornography in some areas, income management programs, and changes to the delivery and management of education, employment and health services.
A 2008 report by the Australian Human Rights Commission found the statistics for confirmed cases of abuse did not support the "allegations of endemic child abuse" that were used as a justification for the measures, and a United Nations Special Rapporteur found the Emergency Response to be racially discriminating and infringing on the human rights of Aboriginal people in 2010.
Dr Hugh Breakey is an ethicist at Griffith University.
He says the Alice Springs youth curfew, along with policies like The Intervention, often fail to address the root causes of crime.
“But in any of these types of policy initiatives and especially the intervention, they're just necessarily very heavy handed and they're very blunt policy instruments so that they don't tend to treat causes, they tend to treat symptoms, but also they stop people doing a lot of ordinary activities and they almost always involve impacting on people's civil liberties and ordinary freedoms that they would have and doing that in a way that's more unfair.”
Dr Breakey says the willingness to implement the curfew does raise questions of a potential double standard in policy approaches when compared with major cities.
“It is clear that different means are being used here to the ones that are ordinarily used in let's say most Australian big cities. And then the question is, does this give rise to a double standard where one people, particularly let's say Indigenous populations are being treated in a different way to other people? The argument might be made that there is a double standard, but perhaps there are levels of public safety and lawlessness that would not be tolerated in major cities that were tolerated in places like Alice.”
Catherine Liddle is the CEO of the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care, or SNAICC, and calls Alice Springs home.
She says this curfew is very different from measures seen in The Intervention and was a necessary pause that allowed the community to re-evaluate its approach to crime.
“Our families remember the curfews and those curfews at that point in time were targeting aboriginal people in particular. This particular curfew is significantly different in that we're talking about 300 square meters for a very short period of time. Like any tipping point, you need a circuit breaker, and I think this is a circuit breaker that was needed, and curfews by themselves don't work. But what it gave the town was a bit of breathing space, a bit of time for organisations and businesses to come together, for government to say, 'how do we do these things differently?'“
Mayor Matt Paterson says one initiative he's pushing for is the introduction of emergency housing options for young people to get them out of abusive environments.
“We also need to build infrastructure for these kids so they've got a safe place to go. Alice Springs or the Northern Territory is one of the only jurisdictions that doesn't have a youth foyer in the country now. The youth foyer has a tremendous amount of success rates, and we certainly need to look at that. It mightn't be the silver bullet, but I think that it's certainly worth a try.”
And lawyer Nick Espie says he'd like to see more investment aimed at addressing systemic issues within the community rather than measures like the curfew.
“There needs to be a lot more focus on addressing the long-term systemic issues such as education, housing, employment and the like. Addressing these things will certainly go a long way to improving the social and emotional wellbeing of young people, of families.”
