PM pulls the hood over his own head

THE Turnbull government’s knee-jerk reaction to the thoroughly misleading ABC special on the treatment of ­inmates at the NT’s Don Dale Youth ­Detention Centre marks yet another failed ­response to the real issue hiding in plain sight.

THE Turnbull government’s knee-jerk reaction to the thoroughly misleading ABC special on the treatment of ­inmates at the NT’s Don Dale Youth ­Detention Centre marks yet another failed ­response to the real issue hiding in plain sight.

Like the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse, the latest show promises to feed those most in need of public reassurance of their own innate sense of morality and do little for those most at risk.

 Had Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s government not been so obsessed with the Roman Catholic Church it would have acknowledged that the overwhelming majority of cases of child sex abuse take place within the home, and that among those cases, there was a significant over-representation of children from broken homes, or de facto ­relationships, and yes, sad but true, of children identified as indigenous.

 The terms of reference res-tricted Justice Peter McClellan to examine child sexual abuse in institutional context; ring-fencing the real problem from much-needed scrutiny.

 So, too, do the Letters Patent for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s commission into “the Child Protection and Youth Detention Systems of the Government of the Northern Territory”, ignore the bigger, almost existential, problem facing the young indigenous people who make up a staggering 97 per cent of the children in detention in the Northern Territory.

 Turnbull’s Rudd-like bull-at-the-gate approach to government meant that his first Royal Commissioner, the former NT Chief Justice Brian Martin, had been replaced within a week of his appointment, by the familiar and ­almost permanently outraged indigenous figure Mick Gooda and former Queensland Sup-reme Court judge Margaret White, who should bring to the commission the judicial exper-ience Gooda lacks.

 Before bailing out, Martin said he would look at “questions about the culture in the system” adding that “whether racism does or doesn’t play a role will be a part of the ­inquiry.

” He jumped ship saying he did not have the “full confidence” of sections of the indigenous community and was not prepared to compromise the inquiry.

 Therein lies the problem.

 Questioning the culture of the system is like looking at the paint job on a crashed car without asking whether the lack of brakes may have been the cause of the smash.

 The institution didn’t put the youngsters in the slammer, but their culture, interpretation of it, or lack of it, did.

 The so-called Abu Ghraib hood was being worn by the ­recidivist inmate Dylan Voller because of his unpleasant habit of spitting at law officers.

 There’s little doubt that the other tough measures — hosing down and tear gas, as disagreeable as they may seem to middle-class ABC viewers — were also used for good reason most of the time.

 The commission will spend a lot of money establishing what two previous inquiries have already established.

 It will not, however, probe the dysfunctional habits of the community from which the young inmates have come.

 Exploring the crisis in those families which identify as indigenous is unpopular because it will expose the myth that the life of Aboriginal Australians prior to the arrival of Europeans was idyllic.

 It might disturb vegans to learn that the early Australians were carnivorous, it might disturb feminists to learn that they were, for the most part, fiercely patriarchal, and it might disturb pacifists to learn that they were often at war with each other.

 Sadly, elements of the old culture of wife beating, polygamy and pat-riarchy still exist within some indigenous communities across the Northern Territory, northern Western Australia and northern Queensland.

 Young girls are threatened with arranged marriages to older men, they are routinely treated brutally by their “husbands” and they have little ­redress.

 Jacinta Yangapi Nampijinpa Price, a woman with a deep understanding of both European and Aboriginal Australia addressed a meeting at the Centre of Independent Studies in Sydney in late June.

 Speaking plainly and from the heart, she addressed the ­issues that the Royal Commissioners will not.

 “What we cannot continue to do,” she said, “is make excuses for violent behaviour.

 Instead of looking for constitutional recognition or treaties or governments to solve the problems, ownership, responsibility and constructive criticism must take place.

 “Yes we’ve worked out the role governments have played in our country’s history but we also must acknowledge our own part in the demise of our people.

 We must acknowledge what within our own culture is detrimental to us finding solutions to our own problems and work out what changes we must make to move forward.

 “Why is it we should remain stifled and live by 40,000-year-old laws when the rest of the world have had the privilege of evolution within their cultures so that they may survive in a modern world? Why in these times should there be an us-and-them mentality? We can’t rid this country of Europeans and the British or those from the rest of the world for that matter who now call Australia home.

 “There was a four-decade long campaign to win citizenship rights for Aboriginal Australians but now the absolute fundamental rights of Aboriginal women, girls and children are being denied and ignored by white feminists and human rights lawyers who believe they know better, who believe that the real perpetrators are English speaking white men.

 We have the same rights as anybody else in this country and it is about time those rights were respected by everybody.”

Ms Price’s commonsense drives deeper to the heart of the basic issue than any Royal Commission has and should be adopted by all Australians.