Alcohol and community safety in the NT

There is a history in all men's lives,

Figuring the nature of the times deceased,

The which observed, a man may prophesy,

With a near aim, of the main chance of things

As yet not come to life…

2 Henry IV, Act 3 scene 1

 

 

In February 2023, the Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Chaired by Labor Senator Patrick Dodson, issued the report on its Inquiry into community safety support services and job opportunities in the Northern Territory (link here).  The terms of reference provided by the Senate in establishing the Inquiry focussed on three broad issues: the remote alcohol policy regime in the NT leading up to and after the sunsetting of the Stronger Futures legislation in June 2022 and its impact on alcohol regulation; remote employment issues; and justice reinvestment policy issues. This post limits itself to the first of these three topics.

 

Senator Dodson’s Foreword to the Committee Report is both a robust critique of past governments and their policies and a succinct high level summary of the Report’s argument. It is worth reading in full. Here is an extract:

… over the past 15 years, [Aboriginal communities in the NT’s] right to self-determination has been deliberately denied by governments of all stripes. The Northern Territory National Emergency Response and the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Acts were both legislative means of structurally disempowering remote Aboriginal communities in the NT. Through these policy regimes, governments have destabilised, disempowered, and disoriented Aboriginal communities. Governments have taken away community power and instead made them dependent on government for survival and have done so with little to no accountability. These actions occurred under the guise of a failure for Aboriginal communities to run their own affairs and to make decisions about what is best for their community.… In order to truly enable community-led solutions, governments need to transfer power and resources to communities. This requires investment based on outcomes, rather than outputs; ensuring data is available at the local level; and listening and acting on what communities say will work best.

 

This argument represents a rhetorical narrative that resonates powerfully with many Indigenous people because it reflects their lived experience of Australia’s history, yet for reasons I set out below it simultaneously serves to gloss over and to some extent erase the complex and in many respects insurmountably difficult issues at the cutting edge of policy development and implementation.

 

A case in point is the Committee’s assessment of the Rudd Labor Government’s Stronger Futures Northern Territory (SFNT) legislation, effectively equating it with the Howard Government’s NTNER legislation. This conflation is facilitated by the fact that Labor while in Opposition voted to support the NTNER to avoid making allegations of Indigenous child abuse in remote communities an election issue, and when in Government continued to support some key elements of the NTNER, most notably compulsory income management of welfare benefits. However policy, and more importantly it tangible impact, is about more than the political ‘vibe’. With policy, the devils (or the angels) are in the detail.

 

The Committee Report usefully summarises both the NTNER legislation (paras. 1.12 to 1.22) and the Stronger Futures (SFNT) legislation (paras. 1.23 to 1.39). In contrast to the NTNER, SFNT removed most of the punitive elements of the previous package, did not involve the Australian Defence Force, allocated significant funding (listed in para. 1.27) totalling $3.4 billion over ten years, and reinstated the application of the Racial Discrimination Act which had been set aside by the NTNER legislation. The Committee preferred to give little weight to these differences, and in it’s comment after assessing these initiatives, it expressed its concurrence with Senator Dodson’s conclusion in the Foreword:

The Committee considers that the NTNER and Stronger Futures legislative packages systemically disempowered communities—in their delivery, implementation and transition—causing immense trauma that now requires concerted effort by all levels of government to enable and invest in the re-empowerment of these communities.

 

To be clear, I do not dispute that finding in relation to the NTNER, and agree that remote NT Indigenous communities have faced and continue to face immense trauma and systemic disempowerment. However, policy solutions (as opposed to political solutions) require rigorous analysis. We should not confuse political advocacy and rhetoric with policy analysis. In particular, I would argue that the sources of these ongoing challenges are not rooted solely in past actions by governments, but are built into the very fibre of the contemporary actions of governments.

 

The dilemma faced by the Joint Standing Committee was that having concluded that the SFNT legislation ‘systematically disempowered’ communities, it leaves very little room for accepting that the SFNT approach to alcohol regulation was and remains, at least in the short/medium term, the best approach to addressing the significant and arguably widening impacts of alcohol abuse within remote communities.

 

In chapter two, the Committee makes what appears to me to be a cursory assessment of the processes leading up to the sunsetting of the alcohol provisions, and the introduction of the NT Government’s ‘opt-out’ mechanism. This allowed affected communities to seek to opt-out of arrangements that had lifted the previous SFNT restrictions. The Committee’s conclusion in effect was that there was a failure of consultation and bureaucratic preparation for the transition from SFNT to largely unrestricted access. My own reading of the process is that both the former LNP Government and the NT Labor Government achieved exactly the outcome that they intended, and the incoming Labor Government in Canberra were not prepared to challenge the NT Labor Government over this issue. In doing so, they grossly under-estimated the consequential political impacts in Central Australia that exploded into national prominence in early 2023, and more egregiously, ignored the impact of the NTG policy on the lives of thousands of Aboriginal women and children.

 

In para 1.6, the Committee notes that the chaos in Central Australia led to policy changes that post-dated much of the evidence they received. These changes are assessed in chapter three of the Committee Report.

 

The first sections of chapter three provide a useful summary of the operations of alcohol controls in remote NT communities over the past two decades. From paras 3.32 to 3.69, the Committee examines issues of alcohol related harm following upon the sunsetting of the SFNT legislation, and the joint Government response in early 2023 to the chaos on the streets of Alice Springs. At para. 3.29, the Committee noted that only one Alcohol Management Plan (AMP) was approved under the SFNT over its ten year life and that a number of communities prepared AMPs but had them rejected. The Committee could have done much more to unpack this issue and provides no detailed data or information. My own understanding is that in the early years of the SFNT legislation, a number of AMPs were prepared, but were sent back for revision as they were effectively attempts to remove all restrictions on access to alcohol and gave inadequate attention to the risks to families and children. After the change of Government, there appeared to be an unannounced policy moratorium  on  considering AMPs. In effect, this involved a return to the NTNER regime of absolute restrictions, albeit effected via administrative fiat. Had such a policy been announced, it would likely have been struck down by the courts.

 

In relation to the operation of the SFNT alcohol regime, the Committee’s comment on the evidence it heard strikes me as particularly tendentious and unpersuasive. It argues that the SFNT legislation ‘focused only on reducing supply and did not sufficiently support people at risk of alcohol abuse or of experiencing or causing harm.’ (para. 3.62). This ignores the significant funding under the SFNT across all sectors, much directed to community controlled organisations, as well as the mechanism in the legislation for AMPs which could have included specific requests for such harm reduction support.

 

In para 3.63, the Committee notes:

The NT Government’s decision to adopt an opt-in approach for maintaining alcohol restrictions was ineffective at minimising harm from the relaxing of alcohol restrictions. While the government intended to address the racist legacy of the Intervention, it is the Committee’s view that this decision was made without meaningfully consulting widely across affected communities.

The first sentence of the Committee’s comment is undoubtedly correct. However, as a reasonably close observer of these events, I do not accept that the motivation of the NTG was to ‘address the racist legacy of the intervention’. It was certainly the rhetorical rationale adopted by the NTG, but this rationale was and is fundamentally flawed as it fails to acknowledge the provision in the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) for special measures, a core element of the legislative mechanism established by the RDA (link here), and one which the NTG’s legal advisers undoubtedly would have brought to Ministers’ attention if they had been asked.

 

Even if we accept that the stated rationale was in fact genuine, what does that say about the NT Government’s concern regarding the potential impact of alcohol on Aboriginal families, and the quality of life now and into the future for countless women and children? I refer readers to the earlier posts on this blog related to alcohol for more detailed critique of the NTG model (link here for a list).

 

In para 3.66, the Committee finally reaches the nub of the policy issue (an issue that has received virtually no attention in the media):

It is clear to the Committee that the NT Government has sufficient legislative means to manage alcohol-related harm within its jurisdiction where there is the will to do so. This has been demonstrated by its recent legislative amendments to the Liquor Act 2019 (NT). It is the view of the Committee that this is the appropriate role of the NT Government (informed by the views of community), rather than the Commonwealth.

This is the key conclusion, because it is the Committee’s rationale for ongoing Commonwealth inaction. While $300m in funding appears substantial, it is not ongoing, and will disappear like a shower of rain into the desert dust. It is not action to address the issues, but funding to manage the media fallout. The Commonwealth’s inaction ignores what appears to be a deliberately misleading narrative seeking to justify the NTG opt in model by alleging the SFNT alcohol regulation model was racist and discriminatory. It represents inaction in the face of a policy approach designed around making the abolition of alcohol restrictions the default; a model which would also have made the reimposition of restrictions challenging to both implement and to sustain. And finally it represents inaction in the face of clear evidence regarding the impact of shifting to an opt-in model. While the NTG have now shifted to an opt-out model as applied under SFNT, there is no guarantee that it will be managed effectively to ensure alcohol induced harm is minimised.

 

The Commonwealth’s current position amounts to placing enormous trust in an NT Government that has shown it was prepared to place the lives of Aboriginal women and children in particular at risk for what appears to be base political advantage.

 

To take just one data point, alcohol related domestic violence assault offences spiked in Alice Springs, Katherine, and outside major centres in the 12 months to March 2023 (link here). The only location where there was a decline in these offences was in Darwin. Across the NT, there were almost 1000 extra reported assault offences over the year coinciding with the nine months of reduced restrictions. With the majority of NT electorates in the Darwin region, it is not difficult to develop a hypothesis for why the NT Government may have been intent on removing alcohol restrictions in the bush. In the light of the issues outlined above, the unqualified confidence of the Committee (set out in para. 3.66) in the capacity and political willingness of the NTG to manage alcohol related harm astounds me.

 

Paras. 3.67 and 3.68 lay out two formal recommendations to the NTG related to the facilitation of community alcohol plans. These are discussed further below.

 

In paras. 3.69 to3.94, the Committee addresses the issue of community safety. In para. 3.69, the Committee acknowledges the existence of anti-social behaviour following the sunset of the SFNT, and notes:

When witnesses discussed these behaviours, they were almost always directly linked to the poor social and economic factors people were facing.

 

I may be over-reading this, but in my experience, these behaviours are almost always directly linked to the abuse of alcohol or drugs, and only indirectly liked to social disadvantage. Yes, structural factors are important — but if the Committee really believed this, why not recommend actions and funding to address these structural factors. It is as if the Committee does not wish to acknowledge the role of alcohol in harming Aboriginal Territorians. At para. 3.82, the Committee returns to blaming past policies, and extraordinarily to my mind states:

The application of special measures under the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) has had little benefit in creating equality for these children.

 

The implication of this statement is to undermine the rationale for a significant swathe of Commonwealth policy measures from Indigenous language support to the Native Title Act. Even if it is argued that it is contextually constrained, it opens the door to future downgrading of special measures, and strikes me as an own goal. The Committee’s comment on community safety (paras. 3.92 to 3.94) ignores the role of alcohol, fails to mention the deep disadvantage arising from the social determinants of poor health, including the shortfalls in basic housing (a matter picked up by Senator Thorpe in her addendum to the report), and instead focusses solely on intergenerational trauma and the need for early intervention. Both these issues should be priorities, but on their own they will provide no short term relief to the ongoing harm caused to both Indigenous people and the wider non-Indigenous community in the NT.

 

The Commonwealth Government response to the Committee report (link here) was released last week. In the introduction, the response notes that the Commonwealth (not the NTG!) has announced investments totalling almost $300m in community safety in the NT since the beginning of this year. The response deals with all nine Committee recommendations, the first three of which relate to alcohol policy and the sunsetting of the SFNT legislation.

 

As is de rigeur for such responses, the response lists each recommendation, and provides a summary response, and then provides a short narrative in relation to each. There are a couple of revealing statements included. For example, in relation to recommendation one, the response asserts that NIAA worked with the NT Government over a period of 18 months leading up the sunset, thus adding weight to my assertion above that the outcome achieved was not a mistake.

 

A second revelation, in the discussion on recommendation two, is that the Commonwealth is providing $14m over two years to assist in the development of community alcohol plans and other support services and a public health campaign, notwithstanding the summary response that the recommendation to the NTG for resources to facilitate this was ‘a recommendation for the NT Government’, and notwithstanding the Committee’s conclusion that the NTG has the legislative means and the political will to manage alcohol related harm in its jurisdiction.

 

The response notes that ‘Independent consultants will be funded to assist in the development of community alcohol plans’. The use of consultants appears to me to be exactly the wrong approach, as it ensures that the work of developing alcohol management plans is undertaken by individuals without any pre-existing or ongoing relationship with the communities affected, and ensures that once it is completed, there is no corporate knowledge retained either by the community nor NIAA. If the Commonwealth is serious about addressing the challenges of remote Australia, a major priority in my view must be to begin to rebuild a cadre of staff either within NIAA, or perhaps within and employed by communities, with the skills and remit to facilitate engagement with governments.

 

The larger problem with this Government response however is that the import of this Committee Report is not to be found in the recommendations, but elsewhere in the swirling narrative which (sometimes explicitly):  

·       avoids the difficult policy issues around alcohol availability and regulation;  

·       downplays the role of the Commonwealth Government vis a vis the NTG in the face of an extraordinary and ongoing policy failure in the NT;

·       ignores the possibility that special interests associated with the alcohol industry play an outsized role in determining regulatory policy in relation to alcohol in the NT; and

·       unsuccessfully seeks to deal with the paradox that the SFNT legislation is simultaneously argued to be retrograde to Indigenous interests yet the evidence following its sunset indicates it was essential to maintaining social stability and reducing social and community harm.

 

In particular, where is the Commonwealth Government’s appreciation of the overwhelmingly negative impacts of alcohol (and other drug) abuse on Aboriginal communities, and particular Aboriginal women and children. Ignoring supply issues — and the even more insidious influence of the alcohol industry on governments — by seeking to shift blame to an alleged historical lack of focus on alcohol demand issues and alcohol harm reduction measures just does not cut it. 

 

Perhaps it is time to give some attention to, and reinforce the relevance of, the 1967 referendum. The referendum that reversed the provision that stated that the Commonwealth could legislate in relation to the people of any race except the Aboriginal race. The referendum that underpins the existence of the Minister for Indigenous Australians and her portfolio, and that facilitates the existence of the Native Title Act and much other Indigenous legislation. The referendum that signalled that the Australian people overwhelmingly expected the Commonwealth Government to do what was necessary to address Indigenous disadvantage.

 

 

Disclosure: I was employed on the staff of the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous affairs from 2008 to 2011 when the Stronger Futures legislation was being developed.

 

11 July 2023

Political and media narratives on alcohol policy in Central Australia

 

Before him he carries noise,

and behind him he leaves tears…

Coriolanus Act 2, scene 1

 

Late last week the media reported the release of NT Police crime statistics which indicate a significant drop in alcohol related crime. According the Guardian (‘Incredibly noticeable’: alcohol bans have cut family violence and crime in Alice Springs, advocates say):

NT police statistics collated by the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress revealed a 37% decrease in domestic violence assaults from January to April. All other assaults dropped 35% while property offences were down 25% over the same time period.

 

It is clear that the reinstatement of the alcohol bans on town camps in Alice Springs and surrounding communities (subject to the potential for Alcohol Management Plans to be negotiated and approved by the NT Government) has had a significant and positive impact on crime in Alice Springs and surrounds.

 

According to a 23 June 2023 front page story in The Australian (Grog bans put brake on Alice Springs violence, (link here $): “…total recorded assaults dived from more than 260 in January to 170 in April…”. The Australian also published an editorial on the issue (A sober Alice Springs starts to get its life back on track’) (link here) which is worth reading both for what it gets right and for what it gets wrong or omits.

 

The editorial’s headline is clearly misleading: Alice Springs is not yet sober and alcohol abuse remains a significant and deadly problem. The Australian’s own article notes that police continue to be concerned about illegal sales of alcohol, and quotes the Police Association President as saying that police on the ground ‘have definitely seen an increase in secondary supply…’. The article goes on to quote NT Police Acting Deputy Commissioner as stating that ‘volumetric restrictions’ on how much alcohol individuals could buy would ‘go further in helping to reduce the alcohol-related harm across the community’.

 

It is not clear what the Deputy Commissioner of Police had in mind when he referred to volumetric restrictions, but it has long been recognised by social scientists that volumetric taxation of alcohol is both more efficient and has considerable health benefits (link here). It is also widely recognised by health professionals that the harms due to alcohol consumption (and particularly over-consumption) are extremely serious. See the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare web report on Alcohol, tobacco & other drugs in Australia (link here) for a discussion of alcohol related harm. To take just two mainstream data points from that report:

(i)            AIHW analysis of the National Hospital Morbidity Database showed that alcohol accounted for nearly 3 in 5 drug-related hospitalisations in 2020–21 (57% or 86,400 hospitalisations); and

(ii)          In 2019–20 alcohol-related injuries resulted in 30,000 hospitalisations (118 per 100,000 population). The most common causes of alcohol-related injury hospitalisations were falls (39%), intentional self-harm (24%), assault (15%) and transport (7.2%)

 

The editorial goes on to allocate blame to the NT and federal governments, as well as to the NIAA and other paid advisers (it names KPMG) for being ‘too distant from the realities of life in the areas they claim to represent’. While the editorial doesn’t name former Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt, it does correctly acknowledge that the decision to allow the Stronger Futures alcohol controls to lapse was made under his watch. The editorial correctly notes that Senator Jacinta Price predicted that the removal of the alcohol bans in the NT would result in an upsurge of violence against women and children. Offsetting that, it might be observed that she was not prescient enough while the preselected candidate for the NT Senate seat to persuade Minister Wyatt to maintain the Commonwealth controls across her electorate.

 

The most egregious omission from this Editorial, and indeed from the whole political narrative related to alcohol consumption and harm (both to individual and to their families including children) is the effective capture of governments of all political persuasions in both Canberra and the NT by the alcohol production and retail industry, and those involved in the associated supply chains. There is a deep-seated and widespread pro-drinking culture across the whole NT population, and governments are terrified of antagonising industry interests because of the nascent potential for those interests to heighten and leverage political opposition in the electorate. Political donations also play a part in both Canberra and Darwin.

 

Meanwhile taxpayers nationally and in the NT are meeting the costs of the health services, the policing, the incarcerations, and the infrastructure damage associated with alcohol induced dysfunction. Aboriginal people and communities bear the direct social and psychological costs of endemic domestic and lateral violence which are exacerbated and in large measure caused by the easy availability of alcohol.

 

Australia provides almost $3bn per annum to businesses to incentivise Research and Development that would otherwise not occur because R&D is a positive externality (link here). The explicit rationale for R& D subsidies to business arhe the existence of positive externalities. That is, businesses do not accrue all the benefits of their R&D and are thus not adequately encouraged to invest in it. There is a public interest in maximising R & D. Yet alcohol harm has extensive negative externalities without government taxation linked to the harm to society generally. That is, the alcohol producers do not bear all the costs arising from the sale of their product, and are thus incentivised to over invest in producing it (and to also lobby against any regulation in the public interest).

 

While governments do tax alcohol, the taxation of alcohol is not driven by the need to internalise the costs, but rather by governments’ revenue raising strategies mediated by the counter-lobbying of particular segments of the alcohol industry. Higher rates of tax on alcohol — ideally related both to the volume of alcohol involved and the the levels of harm arising (link here) — would both reduce the demand and thus the levels of societal harm caused by alcohol consumption, and coincidentally strengthen the abilities of governments to invest in harm minimisation. The AIHW web report cited above notes that the levels of alcohol related harm are higher in remote regions than elsewhere.

 

The ABC too has a report on the new statistics (link here), based on evidence given to an ongoing coronial inquiry into the deaths of four women in NT communities arising from domestic violence by their intimate partners (link here). Two of the cases occurred in Central Australia. The Coroner will undoubtedly make finding in relation to the role, if any, alcohol abuse played in the extended cycles of domestic violence these women suffered, and which ultimately ended with their violent deaths.

 

One problem with the media coverage of many of the challenges facing remote communities is that the coverage inevitably focusses on events and not on underlying processes or causes. However, they also often go further, and actively frame the issues in ways which have the effect, or are designed, to avoid and mislead the consumers of media by focussing on trite but plausible narratives rather than acknowledging the existence of systemic and institutional forces that hold sway over virtually the entire span of public policy in Australia. Yet the government decisions in both Canberra and Darwin can be framed in different ways.

 

The decisions to allow the lapse of alcohol controls, to then resist reinstating those controls, and ultimately — in the face of irresistible political pressure from mainstream interests arising from social chaos engendered by the uncontrolled flood of alcohol into town camps and communities — to lead the Commonwealth Government to intervene and effectively coerce the NT Government to reinstate controls were both geographically and temporally complex.  The Australian editorial frames these decisions as the result of governments not listening to local (Aboriginal) voices.

 

In doing so, The Australian editorial effectively ignores an alternative framing, namely that governments do not listen to Aboriginal voices because they are beholden to the alcohol industry. The sorry history of the NT Labor Government’s approach to the proposal for a Dan Murphy superstore near Darwin airport is redolent with obsequious pandering to alcohol interests (link here). Both the NT and the Commonwealth Parliaments have strong Indigenous representation, including amongst the Ministers who were ostensibly responsible for taking these decisions. It strains credulity to conceive that these decisionmakers were somehow ‘removed from those whose interests they were supposed to protect’, or were not prepared to listen to local voices. These decisionmakers do not spend their entire lives in Canberra nor in Darwin. At their core, these decisions were political decisions, not policy decisions, and were taken because of the systemic power of the alcohol industry.

 

Subsidiary framings (also not explored by the recent media reports) include the possibility that the NT Government was committed to abolishing alcohol controls in order to reduce the flow of itinerants into Darwin and other major centres, and the federal Labor Government was unwilling to itself re-legislate in order to minimise friction with the NT Labor Government, and the concomitant perception of incompetence were it to do so directly. Hence the elaborate charade of a joint media conference to announce Commonwealth funding and the NT Government backflip (link here).

 

I do not absolve the decisionmakers in Canberra and Darwin, on both sides of politics, for their poor and socially destructive decision-making both on this issue and in relation to other shortcomings across the Indigenous policy domain. Decisions that have led to the continuation of extraordinary levels of social harm both for drinkers, but more importantly for their partners and children and local communities.  But nor should media outlets be absolved when they effectively run interference for commercial interests that are the direct cause of so much societal harm.

 

Alcohol abuse is clearly an important contributor to the challenges facing remote Indigenous communities across at least four jurisdictions. It does not however represent the totality of the challenge, and there are no panaceas. A first step however is to understand that the promulgation of misleading or tendentious policy narratives and framings will not lead to effective policy reform. A second step would be to actively consider policy options designed to limit the unrestricted supply of full strength alcoholic beverages across the whole community.

 

Addendum

For those interested, a selection of some previous posts related to alcohol issues in remote Australia are set out below:

 

Alice Springs crisis: observations on remote policy (link here)

Alcohol policy reform in remote Australia: a potential roadmap (link here)

Neil Westbury article on regressive changes to remote alcohol laws in the NT (link here)

Regulating Alcohol in the Northern Territory: in whose interest? (link here)

Alcohol policy reform: addressing the underlying economic incentives (link here)

Alcohol Regulation in Remote NT Communities (link here)

 

Dodge dip and dive: eight ‘data points’ on remote policy

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players

As You Like It, Act two, scene seven

 

A consistent theme on this Blog has been the social, economic and environmental crisis facing remote Australia, and in particular, remote Indigenous communities (link here, link here, link here, link here and link here).

 

It is perhaps time for me to chance my arm and lay out a high level outline of a potential policy strategy along with the accompanying rationale to address this crisis, albeit one that will take time to devise and implement, and longer to gain traction. Nevertheless, the alternative is to keep muddling on, at serious and ongoing cost to the life opportunities of the 150, 000 remote Indigenous residents across Australia.

 

Before doing so, hopefully sometime in the next month, I thought I would present a random and non-prioritised assembly of key remote ‘data points’ or markers that I have been collecting over the month or so. In laying out the data points, I will add some brief contextual commentary. My point in approaching this issue in what is a deliberately adventitious way, without suggesting an order of priority, importance or significance, is to provide a sense of the breadth and interdependence of the policy challenges facing remote Australia and its residents as well as the temporal cycles that permeate this domain.

 

I am hoping readers think about the underlying implications of each data point, but also consider what it means if the data point is replicated more widely. While it is clear that not every remote location and community faces the same circumstances, it is also clear that individual data points are replicated more widely, albeit to an unknown extent, creating notional data sets. Moreover, the interactions of the totality of different notional data sets operate are not independent or constrained, but reinforce each other in ways that resist the constrained and limited policy horizons of governments and policymakers confined by self-imposed bureaucratic silos. The implication of this insight is that policy responses must also be designed and implemented as assemblages of reinforcing initiatives.

 

Remote data points

Data point one: A recent ABC news article reports that in Halls Creek in the Kimberley region of WA, school attendance at the District High School has dropped from 38 per cent in 2021 to 26 per cent last year, compared to 80 per cent across Western Australia's public schools (link here). An earlier August 2022 ABC news article (link here) reported that the Western Australian Coroner had found that poor school attendance was a common factor in the deaths [by suicide] of young people in the town between 2012 and 2016.

 

Data point two: In 2022, ANU researchers finalised an extensive 140 page report on Groote Eylandt for the Anindilyakwa Land Council titled Social Indicators and Data Governance to Support Local Decision Making in the Groote Archipelago (link here). It is worth reading in full for the contextual background. Three sets of issues from the report caught my attention for their policy implications:

The first issue relates to overcrowding: The report notes (pages 87-88) that in 2006, 39% of the community-controlled housing stock was uninhabitable ...The number of Indigenous occupied dwellings in the Archipelago as defined by the census has increased by more than 50% over the past 15 years ….The percentage of census-identified dwellings that are overcrowded declined from 49% in 2016 to 37% in 2021 (pages 87-88). My comment: What the report does not do is to explicitly draw out the policy implications of this data. Notwithstanding the improvements over the past 15 years, overcrowding is clearly a significant issue with a third of houses overcrowded. Yet clearly the substantial investment included in the now discontinued National Partnership on Remote Indigenous Housing had a positive impact. What is unclear is whether the current NT Housing program at a considerably lower level of overall investment will have the momentum to overcome the ongoing rate of housing asset deterioration (in a worsening climate) and continue to eat into the overcrowding backlog. As an aside, the ANU report does not address the quantum and allocation of mining royalties by the ALC on Groote: in many respects, Groote is unique amongst remote communities in northern Australia, and it is the major driver of royalty equivalent payments that fund the operation of all four NT Land Councils plus the ABTA. Royalty allocation decisions are an important issue on Groote as mining will not last for ever. The allocation of royalties must be directed to capital investment (including private housing investment) rather than recurrent expenditure if it is to have a lasting impact. That is an issue for separate consideration and study.

The second issue relates to health: the Report notes (page 106) that for residents of Groote Eylandt, hospitalisation rates are higher now than 20 years ago for all leading causes, except in the case of genito-urinary diseases which includes renal failure …. Other notable increases in the rate of hospitalisation have occurred for external causes and alcohol-related diseases. The latter have been much higher over the decade 2011–2020 compared to 2001– 2010 … Intentional self-harm hospitalisations have also been much higher over the past 10 years, with the rate for females double that for males. My comment: the important, but unanswered question here is what has caused these retrograde developments. It may be a reduction in the quality of health services, but my intuition is that the problem lies more in the area of the social determinants of health.

The third issue relates to education: on school attendance, the report notes that the overall attendance rate at Groote Archipelago schools (% of those enrolled attending only some of the time) has been consistently low at 40–50% since 2011. The overall attendance level (those attending >90% of the time) has been consistently very low at <10% since 2011. In effect, this means that a large share of the current generation of school aged children have missed an effective education. My comment: this is an extraordinary indictment on the NT Government and its education policies.

 

Data point three: A recent academic article on the organisational depth, robustness and footprint of political parties in remote Australia, authored by Griffith University political scientists Duncan McDonnell and Bartholomew Stanford, titled The Party on Remote Ground: Disengaging and Disappearing? (link here and link here). This research documents the weakening and extremely thin footprint of organised political parties in remote electorates such as the Barkly in the NT and the Kimberley in WA, and points to the adverse implications for democratic participation and engagement, including amongst Indigenous citizens. My comment: what the authors don’t say, but perhaps should have, is to emphasise the crucial role of political parties in shaping public policy, and the concomitant consequence that political party remote disengagement risks exacerbating the ongoing remote policy vacuum. See the discussion in my submission to the Joint Select Committee on the Voice Referendum (#65 at link here). I previously posted on the low voting turnouts in remote Australia (link here).

 

Data point four: in a recent Submission (link here) to the Standing Committee on Community Affairs Legislation Committee Inquiry into the provisions of the Social Security (Administration) Amendments (Income Management Reform) Bill 2023, ANU researchers Matthew Gray and Rob Bray  used ABS and AIHW data to track Indigenous imprisonment rates in the NT over the past twenty years against non-Indigenous rates in the NT and nationally (see Figure 1) and Indigenous school attendance rates in the NT over the decade from 2009 to 2020 (Figure 4).

In relation to incarceration, they observe that compared to non-Indigenous adults, Indigenous imprisonment rates have dramatically widened since 2000, exceeding 2700 per 100, 0000 in 2020, up from just under 1000 per 100, 000 in 2000. Non-Indigenous incarceration rates have remained stable throughout these decades at about 200 per 100, 000.

In relation to school attendance, they report declining school attendance across the NT over the past decade, reaching mid sixty percent levels for remote schools and mid forty percent levels for very remote schools. To which I would add two comments: this data is consistent with the Groote statistics cited above, suggesting Groote is not an outlier; and second, the statistics in Figure 4 do not cite the most educationally significant data, namely, the proportion of students who attend 90 percent plus of the time. These data are consistent however with the extraordinary conclusion that a substantial proportion of remote Indigenous students over the past decade are missing out on an education, and there is no policy initiative on the horizon to suggest this will change over the coming decade.

 

Data point five: the Gray/Bray submission referred to above, along with a number of other submissions, comprehensively demonstrates that the continuation by the current Commonwealth Government of universal compulsory income management across remote communities in the NT lacks a robust evidence base. The submission points out that policy breaches Labor’s pre-election promises, and points to departmental efforts to ignore or not publish relevant data. My own comment on this situation is as follows: the underlying rationale for continuing this selective policy can only be a blunt and indirect attempt to limit expenditure on alcohol by remote residents in circumstances where the NT Government is incapable and unwilling to impose robust regulation of the alcohol sales across the NT. This policy is increasingly at risk of tipping into being racially discriminatory, as its status as a ‘special measure’ under the Racial Discrimination Act requires it to have a beneficial impact. Yet if the evidence does not support this, the ‘special measures’ rationale falls apart.

 

Data point six: a recent research publication by ANU researchers (led by my CAEPR colleague Bradley Riley) and representatives of two Central Australian Aboriginal organisations documented the impact of COVID on energy security amongst remote NT residents. Titled Disconnected during disruption: Energy insecurity of Indigenous Australian prepay customers during the COVID-19 pandemic (link here), the research reported that:

The risks associated with the regular de-energization of prepay households have long been overlooked by government reporting and this contributed to a lack of visibility of energy insecurity and available protections for this group during the pandemic response. In contrast to the rest of Australia, energy insecurity in the form of disconnections remained unrelentingly high or worsened for prepay households during this time. COVID-19 magnifies pre-existing health and socio-economic inequities. 

I have previously posted about this issue, and the potential destructive interplay of high levels of pre-pay disconnections and rising temperatures (link here). The recent publication pays particular attention to the lack of comprehensive data. The paper concludes:

While the national moratorium on disconnection provided to post pay customers during COVID-19 meant that experiences of energy insecurity decreased for most Australians, remote living Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prepay customers did not receive commensurate protections …. While there are few published metrics relating to avoiding or reducing the frequency and duration of involuntary self-disconnection events experienced by prepay customers, what data there is shows that frequent de-energization of Indigenous prepay households continued and, in many cases, worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Data point seven: In early February, the ABC had reported that ‘Data reveals 50 per cent spike in alcohol-related emergency presentations after lifting of bans in Alice Springs’ (link here). These bans related to the consumption of alcohol on town camps around Alice Springs, and numerous other remote communities.

 

On 20 April 2023, NT Chief Minister Natasha Fyles issued a media release which stated in part:

The Northern Territory Government will extend takeaway alcohol restrictions in Alice Springs. Over the past three months we have seen these alcohol restrictions work, and support our community and frontline workers. 

Alcohol-related emergency department presentations at Alice Springs Hospital have almost halved, and domestic violence has dropped by a third in the month since the takeaway alcohol restrictions were reintroduced into the Northern Territory town. 

 

While the Chief Minister appears to be shifting the narrative away from the earlier across the board alcohol bans which she initially opposed, and reluctantly agreed to re-introduce after pressure from the Commonwealth, the points to note for present purposes are first the extraordinary human toll of alcohol abuse, and second, the direct link between alcohol consumption levels and hospital presentations. The latest available published data on the NT Government website (link here) is for the fourth quarter of 2022, and indicates 1299 alcohol related hospital emergency presentations. There were a total of 4145 alcohol related emergency presentations at the Alice Springs hospital for the 2022 year. To put this in context, a 2018 Deloittes Report (link here) noted that there had been a total of 46, 785 alcohol related emergency presentations across Australia in 2016-17 (table 2.1). Clearly, alcohol abuse levels in the NT and in Alice Springs have been at extraordinary levels for a considerable time. 

 

Data point eight: on 28 April 2023 Guardian reported (link here) on the ABS release of updated socioeconomic indexes based on 2021 census data which take into account census data on income, education, occupation, housing, employment and family structure, among other factors, to rank each of Australia 547 local government areas (LGAs).  The data is used to create a score with an average of about 1,000. Lower scores indicate areas of relative disadvantage. Unsurprisingly, by my rough reckoning, the 33 most disadvantaged LGAs in Australia all have a substantial majority of Indigenous residents. Of course, even more advantaged LGAs can include pockets of extreme Indigenous disadvantage, but these index scores are moderated by the population mix within the LGA. According to the ABS, “disadvantaged areas tend to be in regional and remote communities, while advantaged areas tend to be in major cities”.

 

Conclusion

I am conscious that these random data points, and particularly the associated notional data sets, largely represent shortfalls in the performance of governments, and are biased towards issues that have received media coverage which in turn is likely to be a proxy for policy attention from governments. Issues that are in my view significant, but are not listed here, include wider health issues (including for example the long lasting effects of FASD); employment / unemployment, and in particular the interaction with the Community Development Program which delivers income support to some 35, 000 remote citizens; environmental management including the operation of Indigenous Protected Areas and ranger groups; the impact and operation of land rights and native title legislation; and issues related to commercial and economic development. Each of these policy domains along with others I have not mentioned undoubtedly interacts with and contributes to the quality of life for remote citizens, along with the policy issues I have addressed. Nor have I focussed on institutional structures such as the operations and effectiveness of Indigenous organisations, or the impact of federal governance.

 

What is clear however is that given the synergistic interactions of multiple policy domains, the current model of policy design and implementation has not worked. This raises the potentially unsettling prospect that, at a fundamental systemic level, governments and policymakers are not incentivised to take the policy decisions that are required to make a substantive difference to the policy challenges that exist. Instead they are incentivised to manage difficult issues, oil squeaky wheels, and engage in a performative ritual designed merely to persuade an electorally significant non-Indigenous constituency (and a less electorally significant, but more animated, Indigenous constituency) that they are doing what is required to address the policy challenges that surface periodically in the public consciousness.

 

A recent review of a book on Boris Johnson (link here) described his motto for governing as ‘dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge’. As it turns out, this is an extraordinarily apt description of the systemic approach of Australian governments to remote policy challenges.

 

 

 

 

 

Alice Springs crisis: observations on remote policy

 

Tis much when sceptres are in children's hands,

But more when envy breeds unkind division:

There comes the ruin, there begins confusion.

Henry VI, Part 1, Act 4, scene 1

 

Yesterday, the Prime Minister, the Minister for Indigenous Australians, and three Indigenous Labor MPs (Patrick Dodson, Marion Scrymgour, and Malarndirri McCarthy) visited Alice Springs to meet with the NT Government, and local community interests.

 

I am loathe to write too much about the unfolding situation in Alice Springs given the amount to material being published in mainstream media. I don’t propose to set out a comprehensive account or summary, and instead would refer readers to the front page reports in the Australian, the ABC and the Guardian over recent days. Below is a quick snapshot of my posts in relation to alcohol policy in remote Australia over the past year or so. I include them to both provide some deeper background, and more importantly to make the point that for close observers of this policy realm (are there any in Government?) it has been very apparent for a considerable time that business as usual was not sufficient and would eventually lead to disaster. Bad as things are, it is not clear that they will not get worse before they improve.

 

In February 2022, I posted a blog reporting on what amounted to a clear decision by the previous Government not to extend the Stronger Futures legislation related to alcohol (and some other issues such as remote stores licencing which has implications for food security in remote communities). That post was titled The Commonwealth is taking us headlong into a remote policy chasm: but who cares? (Link here).

 

In May 2022, I published a post outlining the ongoing social and governance catastrophe in remote Australia (link here). That post dealt with alcohol issues only tangentially, but reinforced the deep structural and systemic underpinnings of the current crisis.

 

In early June 2022, the NT Government announced its approach to loosening the controls on alcohol regulation across remote communities and town camps. I published a post linking to criticism of this approach, and explored the likely rationale for the NTG decision (link here). I argued that the NTG decision was a cynical exercise in encouraging drinkers to remain in remote communities and out of Darwin and major towns. In the case of Central Australia, the systemic incentives to leave underfunded communities are much greater than mere access to alcohol; hence the current issues in Alice Springs.

 

In August, I published a post titled Alcohol policy reform in remote Australia: a potential roadmap. This post dealt with remote Western Australia (link here), and made the case for the Commonwealth to inject itself into the remote alcohol policy arena.

 

In December 2022, I published a post titled Cataclysm and crisis: the two sides of the policy tragedy engulfing remote northern Australia (link here). That post was headed with a quotation from Hamlet: ‘This bodes some strange eruption to our state’. The post concluded as follows:

The inability of governments to envisage, understand and put in place effective strategies to address the multiple facets of the economic and social cataclysm facing remote communities amounts to a massive and fundamental failure. This failure is in and of itself a crisis; a crisis of governance capability, a crisis of will power, and ultimately a crisis of government legitimacy.

The implication that inevitably follows is that the solutions (for they will inevitably be multiple) must go beyond focussing on a single issue (housing, or health or food security or alcohol, or crime, or education, or incarceration, or unemployment or economic development, or land tenure, or dispossession or the impact of colonisation). 

 

I recommend reading those previous posts to obtain an inkling of the systemic underpinnings of the current situation in Alice Springs.

 

Below, I lay out a series of observations that are not getting much critical attention in the current media tumult. They are not intended as a comprehensive analysis of the current situation nor are they in any particular order.

 

First, there have been statements by both Government, the Opposition, and the NT Government seeking to blame their political opponents for the flow on from the decision to allow the Stronger Futures legislation that curtailed access to alcohol across many remote NT Aboriginal communities. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton called on the Government to reinstate the alcohol bans that expired in July last year (link here and link here). Yesterday, the Prime Minister argued (link here) that the Stronger Futures legislation had expired before the first parliamentary session under the new Government (elected in May 2022). While technically correct, the new Labor Government always had the option of moving to reinstate the legislation, or proactively engaging with the NT Government to ensure alcohol controls were not loosened. In the final analysis, the new Government could have announced an intention to reinstate the Stronger Futures legislation in the event that the NT Government failed to legislate in similar terms. The NT Government spent months mischaracterising the Stronger Futures legislation as racially based and thus discriminatory (link here and link here) while ignoring the fact that it was designed as a special measure under the Racial Discrimination Act which allows ostensible discrimination that is designed to benefit the people of a particular race. The Albanese Government, the former Morrison Government, and the Labor NT Government all had the opportunity to ensure that the Stronger Futures legislation continued with a zero or miniscule interregnum. Rewriting history to blame political opponents while seeking to avoid responsibility merely serves to signal that politics continues to play a major role in managing the response of our political elites to the situation in Alice Springs.

 

Second, as my previous posts made clear, the current issues in Alice Springs are (i) symptomatic of underlying structural and systemic policy challenges; and (ii) are constituent elements in a much more geographically expansive crisis that has been ebbing and flowing across remote Australia for decades, and had become significantly worse in the past three to five years. Alcohol abuse is a significant element in this crisis, but it is far from the only factor in play.

 

Third, the media reports on social dysfunction across remote Australia invariably focus on events in particular places and at particular times, but rarely do reporters step back and provide a holistic and coherent narrative that joins the dots both geographically, and in terms of the multiple sectors impacted. Media hype, however accurate, rarely provides the full picture, and is not adequate for policy formulation. Yet increasingly, Governments have abdicated on their responsibility to prepare and publish comprehensive, accurate and and coherent policy relevant analyses across the breadth of public policymaking. Analysis has given way to propaganda and public relations. This abdication of responsibility is particularly costly in relation to remote Australia given the thin levels of public discussion and knowledge of what goes on in remote places and communities.

 

Fourth, in the context of the present tumult around alcohol regulation, and the promulgation of a confusing amalgam of geographically constrained temporary and ongoing policy proposals by both the Federal and the NT Government, no media outlets have asked the PM, the Leader of the Opposition, or the NT Chief Minister, to reveal the level of political donations to their party organisations from interests associated with the alcohol industry. Given the crisis of legitimacy surrounding the quality of governance in relation to these current issues, it seems an obvious question to ask policymakers and politicians: how does the community know that you are not conflicted in proposing policy solutions that should be in the public interest. Political donations are theoretically made public, albeit after a considerable delay. However, there is nothing stopping any of the political players shaping policy in relation to the social crisis rolling out from compiling and publishing in a clear and transparent form the donations received from alcohol industry corporations over say the past three years. The absence of such a transparent statement from policymakers and their political opponents should provide cause for concern in relation to the policy solutions that are being proposed.

 

Fifth, there appears to be a correlation between the substantial pull back and withdrawal of the Commonwealth from the remote policy arena over the past decade and increasing levels of dysfunction. The NT Government does not appear to have the policy and financial capability to make a difference, and nor does it appear to have the political will power. The State Governments of Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland are too focussed on managing the complex issues of urban development in their respective major cities to give the particular needs of remote regions the priority they require. The 1967 referendum gave the Commonwealth a legislative and policy remit for Indigenous affairs for a reason, yet the Commonwealth’s role is being incrementally dismantled without any public debate or consideration.

 

Sixth, this morning on ABC Radio National, Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney recounted visiting the Alice Springs Hospital last night in the company of Marion Scrymgour, the member for the seat of Lingiari. The Alice Springs hospital has 16 beds in its Intensive Care Unit. Minister Burney mentioned that she was shocked to learn that last night, 14 of those beds were taken by women who had been the victims of violent assaults. This window into the lived experience of too many remote women and their families is more than a warning of the seriousness of the rolling crisis across remote Australia. It is more than a prompt for governments to take action. It is more than an indictment on the quality and legitimacy of our systems of governance across northern Australia. It is damning evidence of the complicity and responsibility for these outcomes of those Australians (myself included) who take an interest in public policy. 

We owe it to our children and our grandchildren to solve these issues. If we are don’t, future historians will write about us and the policies we implemented as no better than those of the perpetrators of colonial violence. Solving these structural and systemic issues, borne of sustained and ongoing exclusion and inequality, is in the public interest and the national interest.

[This post was revised on 29 January to correct a small number of typographical and grammatical errors]