The ongoing social and governance catastrophe in remote Australia.

                                                                        Our country sinks beneath the yoke;

It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash

Macbeth, Act 4, scene 3.

 

In October 2009, Nicolas Rothwell, writing in The Australian, published a scathing analysis under the title ’The failed state’. The parallels with the more recent analyses are striking. Importantly, Rothwell’s analysis was directed at a Territory Labor Government.

 

Rothwell’s opening sentence sums up his argument: ‘The Northern Territory is a lost cause’. He goes on:

There is, though, a failed state in our midst. That state is not Aboriginal north Australia, where the social fabric is in shreds and tatters. No: it is the jurisdiction largely responsible for entrenching this degree of Indigenous disadvantage: the modern-seeming, self-governing Northern Territory.

I quoted these observations in an earlier post in August 2016 (link here). It is worth reading or re-reading that post in full. I would add however that the responsibility for entrenching Indigenous disadvantage is shared with the Commonwealth.

 

Six years on, the fundamental structural issues identified by Rothwell persist, and are arguably both worsening and present across much of northern Australia, albeit attenuated in the Kimberley, North Queensland and the APY Lands by the demographic shape and larger financial capacity of the respective state governments.

 

How do we know this? Well it is in plain view, laid out in media reports that fail to gain much attention in an election campaign focussed on middle Australia and issues of national security and the cost of mortgages.

 

So for example, media reports indicate that an acute social crisis has been underway in the remote community of Wadeye for months. Wadeye is one of the largest remote communities in northern Australia with a population approaching 3000 people.

 

In November 2020, ABC News reported on an outbreak of community violence involving the burning of a house and cars, and community concern regarding the perceived lack of a police response (link here).  

 

More recently, on 27 April 2022, ABC journalist Roxanne Fitzgerald reported on an escalating eruption of intra-communal violence involving the torching of 37 houses, the displacement of 400 residents of affected housing, and the closure of the community’s only food shop (link here). 

 

On 2 May 2022, the ABC was reporting that a ‘massive aid effort’ was underway for the Wadeye residents displaced by violence (link here). The news article refers to health service and teaching staff shortages, and plummeting school attendance rates. According to the ABC, the response from government included the provision of 100 food packs by the West Daly Regional Council (local government), an announcement of an assessment of the extent of housing repairs required by the Department of Chief Minister, as well as liaison with the Commonwealth regarding relaxation of Centrelink reporting requirements. The NT Remote Housing Minister Chansey Paech indicated (somewhat defensively) that the NT Government was looking at options ‘around the urgent provision of infrastructure to make it possible for residents who wish to move onto their homelands (outstations) as soon as possible’, and pointed to Federal Labor’s pledge to invest $100m in homelands if elected.

 

The CEO of the local Thamarrurr Development Corporation was quoted as citing the situation as a crisis, and pointed to a 2005 socio-economic report into Wadeye by ANU researchers John Taylor and Owen Stanley (link here) which identified a structural imbalance in government funding involving under-investment in ‘positive’ policies such as education, employment creation and housing, and over-investment in expenditures on welfare and policing. It seems that little has changed over the past two decades.

 

The recent issues in Wadeye are not new. In her book Teaching ‘Proper’ Drinking (link here), Maggie Brady has a chapter describing a 1988 riot directed against the club that dispensed alcohol in the town. In May 2006, The Age ran an article (link here) which began: ‘Gang violence has turned the remote indigenous community of Wadeye into a war zone.’

 

The existence of longstanding and persistent problems at Wadeye of this scale and import are on their own a serious indictment of governments’ credibility, capability, and ultimately legitimacy. And the repercussions in terms of mental health, disrupted schooling, and physical violence have an incalculable but clearly negative impact on the life opportunities of generations of Aboriginal people.

 

Yet Wadeye is not unique.

 

The Pilbara and Kimberley regions of Western Australia have over the last three or four decades faced similar issues in different communities, including problems with alcohol and FASD (successfully managed in Fitzroy Crossing via the imposition of controls on full strength beer), spates of youth suicide leading to a number of high profile coronial inquiries and the closure and ultimately to the bulldozing of the Oombulgurri community in the East Kimberley (link here). That the region continues to confront challenges can be gauged by recent WA Government funding announcements seeking to address persistent waves of youth crime. Just this week, it announced over $40m in further funding in the Pilbara (link here) and the Kimberley (link here).

 

The APY lands in northern South Australia have a similar history of social dysfunction and underinvestment in core services.

 

Perhaps the most traumatic insight into remote community challenges has been the experience of Yuendumu in recent times.

 

In the most recent edition of The Monthly (link here), Anna Krien, in her must read essay A shooting in Yuendumu, lays out an excoriating account of the lead up to, and fallout from, the police shooting of 19 year old Warlpiri teenager Kumanjayi Walker in November 2019 in the course of an attempted arrest on the day of a large funeral. Walker’s tragic and blighted life provides a lens through which to view the reality, impact and consequences of the community chaos that engulfs many remote communities and townships.

 

I don’t propose to go over the ground covered by Krien, but instead focus on reading between the lines of her essay to highlight the elisions in her account and some of the background factors that played a part in creating the conditions for what transpired. It strikes me that Krien’s focus on laying out the sequences of events within the concise format of an essay inevitably meant that the underlying structural forces that were indirectly in play, and arguably crucial to shaping the ultimate outcome, were glossed over. Moreover, her framing is not policy related, but more akin to surfacing and connecting an underlying narrative with political and ethical implications for the way society operates.

 

As I read Krien’s essay, I was simultaneously reading between the lines for the systemic connections that played into her narrative. Krien alerts us to Walker’s likely neurological and intellectual disability, the probable effect of FASD, foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, the result of excessive alcohol consumption by his mother during her pregnancy. Krien notes Walker’s mother had sniffed petrol and drank heavily while pregnant, and died of heart failure at age thirty. At the age of six months, Walker had been diagnosed with ‘failure to thrive’. Prevalence data for FASD is patchy, but data for remote Indigenous communities in WA suggests 194 cases per 1000 live births (2002-2003 data), and an extraordinary 466 per 1000 Indigenous children aged 10 to 17 in WA detention (2015-16 data) (link here). Effective policies to limit alcohol consumption by pregnant women are the key to addressing these issues. The destructive and long term impact on individuals and communities has been known for decades, yet alcohol management policy continues to be driven more by commercial interests than community welfare (link here and link here).

 

Krien mentions the staffing constraints on key services, a function of the budget priorities of governments. The nurses in the Yuendumu clinic were evacuated on the day of the funeral over concerns for their safety arising from prior break ins to their living quarters. Nurse safety has been an ongoing issue in remote communities for many years (link here and link here). Police staffing was extraordinarily stretched, with Krien noting that the four police and one community policeman resident in Yuendumu were responsible for an area of 125, 000 sq kms, three remote settlements and a goldmine. There have been longstanding issues with under-provision of both police stations and adequate police numbers in remote communities.

 

One of the key elements of the Commonwealth Government’s post-intervention Stronger Futures in the NT funding agreements was the provision of extra police stations and 60 additional police (link here). That funding was for ten years ending in June 2022. It was recently extended for a further two years. See my critique of that decision (link here). Notwithstanding the additional Commonwealth assistance, it is clear that the NT Government has not been prepared to ensure adequate police services are provided in remote communities . See this 2016 post (link here) exploring the underinvestment in police services on Groote Eylandt, and the moral hazard raised where Commonwealth funding allows increased scope of the NT Government to underfund key services. The recent announcement (link here) that the coming NT Budget will increase funding for remote policing is clearly a response to an unwinding social situation in Wadeye in particular, and the bush in general, and raises the question: is it too little too late?

 

Krien also points to the differing approaches within the NT police force. The ‘community policing’ role of police resident in communities built around building relationships and gaining trust and a more aggressive ‘para-military style’ that divides the community into those who deserve protection and those seen as a threat. The use and tactics of the NT Police Immediate Response Team (IRT) in Yuendumu set aside the community policing approach, and ultimately led not just to the death of a teenager, but in the eyes  of many Aboriginal people, to a much wider loss of trust in the fairness and objectivity of the rule of law in the NT (link here). It is clear that there is an unresolved wider issue within state police units operating in remote contexts that revolves around the governance and accountability principles that are applied in practice. The political influence of police unions and the increasing militarisation of police capabilities, and hence mindsets, should be an issue of much more salient concern to Australians generally. And of course, as Krien implicitly notes in citing texts between police referring to a police posting to Alice Springs as ‘being like the Wild West and fuck all the rules in the job really…’, remote communities are the sharp end of potential misuse of that hyper-militarised policing capability.

 

Krien mentions the education system only in passing, mentioning that while living in Katherine, ‘Walker did a little bit of school. Could write his name.’ She recounts the young boy’s extensive list of medical treatment, which would also have affected his education. Krien also mentions Walker’s experience in the Don Dale detention centre school. She notes a teacher’s comment that Walker was unpredictable and that school kids from desert communities inside Don Dale struggle. She then segues to the issues uncovered by the Royal Commission into Youth Detention, whose recommendations are yet to be fully implemented by the NT or Commonwealth Governments (link here).

 

Intuitively, basic education is the key to maximising life opportunities. It may take different forms, and emphasise different cultural values and perspectives, but its complete absence for a significant portion of today’s remote youth is clearly a fundamental problem both for the present and the future. Yet governments persist in spouting misleading rhetoric that seeks to ignore a harsh reality, namely, that having stepped in to replace culturally based learning (that served Indigenous people well for sixty thousand years), the settler state’s current remote education systems are failing badly. They are leaving remote youth without access to culturally based education, yet unable to ensure engagement with mainstream education (link here and link here). It is no wonder many young people are confused and lost.

 

Krien mentions Walker’s significant criminal record, including theft, break in, property damage and aggravated assault, the latter directed against his partner. He had spent time in both the Alice Springs and Don Dale juvenile detention centres. Krien points out in passing that in the NT, the Indigenous population comprises 30 percent of the population, but 84 percent of the prison population. The over-representation of First Nations citizens is both longstanding and impossible to deny, with the Australian Law Reform Commission having investigated the issue in recent years. Yet Governments prevaricate (link here). Recent research by Shepherd et al (link here; citation below) points to the existence of an incarceration gap within the Indigenous community affecting the 20 percent of Indigenous males who have experienced incarceration. For this cohort, there were very strong correlations between past and present incarceration and lack of educational attainment, labour force participation and drug and alcohol problems. For the 80 percent of Indigenous males who had no experience of incarceration, social indicators were much closer to the mainstream norm. The researchers also pointed to the significantly worse outcomes across these social indicators in remote regions. Clearly there are complex systemic issues at work.

 

Admittedly, solutions to the incarceration crisis in Indigenous Australia are not easy, and undoubtedly require a mix of prevention, legislative adjustment, and time. Yet ‘head in the sand’ approaches by governments merely allow the situation to worsen, and fuel the inevitable backlash from mainstream businesses and citizens who are dealing with the very real impacts of criminal behaviour on their lives and livelihoods. Governments focussed on the public interest would seek to address both the short term issues and the underlying systemic issues. Indeed, the tension over appropriate approaches to policing mentioned above are likely exacerbated by the ubiquitous reliance on overstated rhetoric and framing short term responses, thus effectively kicking the problem of finding a sustainable solution down the road.

 

Finally, I wish to point to the issue of housing and overcrowding. Krien doesn’t mention it except in passing as she describes the attempted arrest of Walker inside house 511. Her article includes on its title page a photograph of the bleak and almost windowless front of the rust coloured house (it resembles a garage shed), the numerals 511 painted on the eave, surrounded by red sand, a lone sneaker, desultory rubbish, a mattress and sheet iron windbreaks on one side of the front yard, a set of mattress inner springs on a frame on the other. A solar water heater on the roof along with a somewhat incongruous satellite dish. In the foreground, a lone pink plastic pyramid marks the position of some element of the police investigation. Beside the front door are a bunch of flowers and a small white cross. The image exudes deep-seated despair.

 

Yet almost all housing in Yuendumu and similar remote communities across northern Australia are public housing, owned and maintained by relevant governments. I have written many articles on the issues of remote housing in this blog and elsewhere, and don’t propose to regurgitate my concerns at the cuts to remote housing funding by the current Commonwealth Government and the shortcomings of the NT system of tenancy management and timely repairs and maintenance (link here). Media reports regularly inform us of the poor state of housing and high levels of overcrowding (link here and link here). It is inconceivable to me that the desultory investment by governments in social housing in these communities is not a core contributor to the health, education and employment outcomes that lead to the sorts of life experienced by Kumanjayi Walker.

 

Each of the systemic issues identified above, and I can safely say numerous other issues such as the impact of climate change and flawed policy on energy provision to remote households (link here), are devastating in their own right. But they operate together, each reinforcing the other, to create a dystopian maze of incoherent policies, and punitive suppression of individual and community opportunity. The problems are systemic and structural, and it follows that the solutions too must be systemic and structural.

 

Last year, I reviewed Melinda Hinkson’s book See How We Roll (link here), an incisive account and insight into the ways that Warlpiri people (who live in Yuendumu and the surrounding region) see their world, and how they deal with the ubiquitous uncertainty, pain and chaos that permeates their lives. Hinkson’s underlying assumption, one shared in the 1970s by Nugget Coombs and Bill Stanner (link here), is that Warlpiri people have a right to choose the way they live their lives, and by implication she provides a critique of longstanding policy frameworks which seek — and consistently fail — to shape, incentivise and ultimately coerce Indigenous people into western ways of living. It is not that one way is better than another, but that people deserve to have a choice. While easy to write or say, it has proven to be an enduring challenge for policymakers to frame policies that are facilitative rather than coercive or manipulative.

 

Nicolas Rothwell was right in 2009, and his description then remains applicable today. The experiences over decades of people in Fitzroy Crossing, Oombulgurri, Fregon, Wadeye, Aurukun, Yuendumu, and many other remote communities, and the concomitant and tragic devastation surrounding the lives of so many individuals and families, merely serves to confirm that there is a systemic and longstanding failure by governments in the remote Indigenous policy space. Putting this right must be a national priority. All Australians have some measure of responsibility for the failure of our governments.

 

Remote Australia requires a ‘new deal’. It requires significantly increased government investment. Most importantly, it requires greater and more effective engagement with remote residents based on acknowledging their prior ownership, their violent dispossession, and an acknowledgment that mainstream Australia is the source of the fundamental disruption that is creating ongoing chaos. The ubiquitous assumption amongst mainstream Australia’s institutions dealing with remote Australia has been that the past is irrelevant and that we should all just look forward. This assumption has not worked and mainstream Australians need to be smart enough to rethink our fundamental approaches to the interaction of the nation state with remote communities. Failure to do so will continue the systemic exclusion that lies at the heart of the problems we are seeing in communities like Yuendumu and Wadeye, and which continues to destroy the lives of thousands of people such as Kumanjayi Walker, his partner, his mother, and indeed his wider family and community.

 

Continued policy failure in remote Australia is an abscess on our nation's body politic and the ensuing infection, if untreated, will ultimately expand. To maintain legitimacy and trust in the core institutions of our national governance over the long term, governments must govern for all citizens, and not just for privileged interests. At present, it is patently clear that across remote Australia, they do not meet this basic prerequisite for legitimacy.

 

References:

Shepherd, S.M., Spivak, B., Ashford, L.J. et al. Closing the (incarceration) gap: assessing the socio-economic and clinical indicators of indigenous males by lifetime incarceration status. BMC Public Health 20, 710 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-08794-3

 

Wright LK, Jatrana S, Lindsay D Workforce safety in the remote health sector of Australia: a scoping review BMJ Open 2021;11:e051345. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2021-051345

[This post has been amended to correct some typographical errors and to slightly improve clarity in the final paragraph. Thankyou to JCA.]