Matt Cunningham: Jacinta Price and Marion Scrymgour forewarned of Alice Springs issues

As debate turns to whether a Voice to parliament would have quashed Alice Springs’ issues before they caught the national spotlight glare, two Territory voices have emerged the loudest.

Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney says the problems facing Alice Springs might have been avoided if there was an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to parliament.

Whatever your position on the Voice, this argument is hard to follow.

It’s a statement contradicted by events in the eight months before the trouble in the Outback town attracted such prominence that the Prime Minister was forced to visit.

Community leaders in Alice Springs say one of the driving forces behind a rise in crime – particularly domestic violence and alcohol-related assault in the past six months – was the decision to end Intervention-era alcohol bans in Aboriginal town camps and many smaller Indigenous communities when the Stronger Futures legislation expired on July 17.

Nine Indigenous organisations including the Aboriginal Medical Services Alliance of the NT, the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress and Danila Dilba Aboriginal Health Service had written to Ms Burney on June 9 raising their serious concerns about the impact this decision would have.

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price in the senate at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Two weeks after the bans were lifted, newly elected federal politicians Marion Scrymgour and Jacinta Price stood in our federal parliament in Canberra and voiced their alarm that the bans had been dropped overnight with no plans in place to manage the return of alcohol.

“When a government puts a protective regime of that kind in place, and leaves it in place for that long, you can’t just suddenly pull the pin on it without any protection, sanctuary or plan for the vulnerable women and children whom the original measure was supposed to protect,” Ms Scrymgour said in parliament.

“To do that is more than negligent – at the level of impact on actual lives it is tantamount to causing injury by omission.

“I’m not saying that the town camp alcohol measures should have continued, but I am saying that before they were allowed to lapse, harm minimisation should have been properly addressed.”

Marion Scrymgour. Picture: Floss Adams.

Senator Price said the removal of the bans had “allowed the scourge of alcoholism and the violence that accompanies that free rein, despite warnings from elders of those communities”.

She warned it would only exacerbate the horrific rates of abuse suffered by Aboriginal people.

“I don’t know where else in Australia, a member of federal parliament can provide a tour of the numerous places their direct family members have been violently murdered, or died of alcohol abuse, suicide or alcohol-related accidents,” she said.

“It is not good enough that children have witnessed or been subjected to normalised alcohol abuse, domestic family and sexual violence throughout their young lives.”

Given the alarm bells that were being rung by Aboriginal women from both sides of politics, you might have imagined there would be urgent change.

When I interviewed Ms Burney at the Garma Festival in Northeast Arnhem Land a week later she expressed serious concern about the situation and said she was having discussions with the Northern Territory government which was monitoring the situation.

Federal Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

It can’t have been monitoring it too closely, because even though the carnage continued, nothing changed.

This week a doctor from the Alice Springs Hospital told me they had treated a woman whose husband had tried to decapitate her before slitting his own throat. In another case an eight-year-old girl had been forced to wave down an ambulance to get help for her baby sister because their mother was too drunk.

Yet it wasn’t the warnings from Ms Scrymgour and Senator Price in the Federal Parliament that eventually got the Prime Minister to Alice Springs this week. That happened because Alice Springs Mayor Matt Paterson made headlines with a call for the Australian Defence Force to be sent in, and he and local business owner Darren Clark started doing interviews on Sydney commercial radio.

This week, Senator Price’s warnings about the alcohol-fuelled abuse suffered by Aboriginal women and children have been vindicated. And Ms Scrymgour has shown the nation what people who followed her political career in the Northern Territory have long known; she is a fierce advocate for her constituents and won’t be stopped from speaking her mind, even if it embarrasses her own party.

The two most powerful Aboriginal voices in the country are now women from Alice Springs. The question is whether anyone will listen to them.

Originally published as Matt Cunningham: Jacinta Price and Marion Scrymgour forewarned of Alice Springs issues