Desert Alcatraz: What life will be like inside Bob’s boot camp
If Katter’s Australian Party win the balance of power in the upcoming state election it’s here that juvenile criminals will find themselves doing time, writes Michael Madigan.
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THE names tell the story - Gunpowder Creek, Rifle Creek, Battle Mountain- and neither they nor the rugged country they represent speak of a comforting refuge for the youths we once referred to as “juvenile delinquents”.
Juvenile delinquents, or what troubled kids themselves often now refer to as simply “juvie,’’ (Juvenile Justice) will be a major issue in the October 31 state election.
Up in North Queensland, where residents were recently left stunned by reports of four teenage lives destroyed in a stolen car wreck, it will be a defining theme for campaigns in several seats including Thuringowa, Mundingburra and Townsville.
Katters Australian Party, with candidates in all three, jumped out of the blocks this week, fleshing out its youth justice policy with a bold and ambitious plan to create what would amount to a desert Alcatraz for troubled youths in a remote location one hour’s drive north of Mount Isa.
The land surrounding the tiny, dust-blown town of Kajabbi which was built, quite literally, at “the end of the line,’’ and named as a railway station in 1915, was once a blood stained battle ground.
As white settlers moved into the north west the local Indigenous people, the Kalkadoon, waged a sophisticated six year guerrilla war campaign against them.
That campaign culminated in the Kalkadon’s Waterloo in 1884 at Battle Mountain where the tribe, pitted against troops led by Frederick Charles Urquhart of the Cloncurry Native Police, fought courageously, but were no match for the white man rifles.
Many of the fiery Kalkadoon’s sons and daughters found their way to Palm Island off Townsville, identified in 1918 by the Aboriginal Protectorate as a suitable penitentiary for “troublesome cases,’’ and many of their offspring drifted back across the sea to settle in Townsville
Today, if the KAP wins the balance of Power in the October 31 election, the great-grandsons of those Kalkadoon warriors may be coming home, not to hunt the Nail-tail Wallaby which might still occasionally skip across the dry bed of the Leichhardt River, but to be confined to an isolated penitentiary that’s won’t need a security fence
“They won’t think they are going for a holiday when they come to a place like this,’’ declares the KAP boss Robbie Katter.
“Buija-ke!’’ declares his father, Bob Katter, the 75-year-old KAP founder as he stares out the window of a light plane a few kilometres above Charters Towers on the flight out to Kajabbi early last Saturday morning.
Katter senior, the federal member for the massive seat of Kennedy which now sprawls out beneath him, is determined to make the Queensland KAP a dominant force in regional Queensland and sees the detention centre as an electoral winner. “Buija-ke was the word for banishment used by east coast tribes,’’ he explains.
“For thousands of years it was like that - if you played up and did minor crimes, you were sent out bush by yourself until you learned to behave yourself, and then you came back into the camp.’’
Katter, who sees Kajabbi as the perfect location for a bout of 21st Century buija-ke, has a grand vision of no nonsense, spartan dormitories, which the residents would help build themselves, lined up on a ridge line next to Lake Julius about half an hour’s drive from the township.
Rugby league football matches to play, horses to ride, canoes to paddle on Lake Julius, vegetable patches to tend (from which their food would also come) and the steady oversight of men like “the Friendly Mauler’’ (Glynn Johnson) an undefeated champion of Fred Brophy’s legendary boxing troupe who also happens to live at Kajabbi and has demonstrated a capacity to help troubled youth, are all part of the ambitious, state and federal funded project which would only get off the ground if the KAP wins the balance of power in the 93 seat Queensland Legislature.
And that is a distinct possibility.
Katter, who has some experience playing what he likes to call “piggy-in-the-middle”,’ is banking on the October election providing the KAP with a re-run of his experience in the federal parliament in 2010 when he and two other independents, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor, held the nation spellbound as they hammered out deals in return for backing a government into power.
Oakeshott and Windsor went with Julia Gillard’s Labor Government while Katter withdrew and retained his independence - perhaps wisely given the old “Country Party’’ bent of many Kennedy voters who would be unforgiving of their MP playing footsies with the ALP.
Robbie Katter, who stands a reasonable chance of increasing his three seat presence in the Queensland House to four with his candidate Julianne Wood in the seat of Thuringowa, may not feel himself so constrained, and already has a detailed laundry list of demands if he emerges as the Queensland ‘’piggy”.’
On top of that list will be the Kajabbi juvenile centre which won’t be limited to Indigenous youth, but will be designed with the high number of Indigenous kids in the juvenile justice system in mind.
Katter Jnr sees the centre catering to kids all over the north but you can forget intense counselling sessions and sympathetic psychological assessments of troubled backgrounds.
“Learn how to pour a slab, build a fence, ride a horse, muster cattle,’’ says Katter Junior who doesn’t envisage a short stay at “Club Kajabbi.’’
“Some of these programs they have, they take the kids out for three or four weeks and that is better than doing nothing,’’ he says.
“But that is not going to do the trick, they have to be in it for the long terms, particularly the kids who have a layer of issues to deal with.’’
As for costs, Katter senior who has rifled through Queensland Treasury Corporation figures and brought in every variable from the cost of building Townsville’s Cleveland Youth Detention Centre through to amortisation, wages and repairs, puts the bill of looking after one youth detainee in Cleveland at $560,000 per annum.
“Out here we could do it for around $56,000 a year,’’ he says.
As Robbie Katter points out, security costs would be one of the big savings,
“You don’t need the security you need in a metropolitan area because out here there is nowhere for them to go, nowhere to run.’’
The plan looks ambitious, but not entirely unfeasible.
The proposed location at Lake Julius has both power and water and already supports buildings that have served as school retreats for years.
But The LNP Government under Campbell Newman had similar “boot camp’’ ambitions in the more accessible location of Kuranda near Cairns.
That 2013 proposal got off the ground but had disappeared, along with the Newman Government, by 2015.
It was subject to a KPMG evaluation under the incoming Labor Government which found it blew out to eight times its initial estimated cost of $2 million, and did little to stop repeat offending.
As Katter senior summarises the LNP’s boot camp: “They sent three kids to Kuranda and the kids didn’t like it - they caught a bus back to Townsville.’’
Yet to Julianne Wood, the former public servant who became something of a local celebrity when she began a Facebook page “Take Back Townsville’’ which has attracted thousands of followers, the detention centre is one way out of what she sees as a prolonged community nightmare.
Pointing to Queensland Police Service figures, she says up to 40 cars can be stolen in one month while break and enter figures can double that.
“”And if the kids responsible are caught, they are back out on the street the next night doing the same thing,’’ she says.
“Townsville has had enough.’’