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)