Vikki Campion: Voices of Alice Springs still being ignored

The people of Alice Springs screamed that their town was broken until their throats burned. It fell on deaf ears. It would be a different story if this was another Australian city, writes Vikki Campion.

Teenage boys on the streets of Alice Springs at night. Picture: Mark Brake

This is a true story. Only the names of the suburbs have been changed.

In Frenchs Forest, the sounds of Manly ring through the night, screaming brakes, shattering glass, aluminium crushing a metal roller door. The driver is a drunk local kid.

At night, people in Manly wake to find intruders in their children’s bedrooms or breaking into their businesses, causing tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage only to steal a few bottles of booze.

There was a murder-suicide where a man killed himself, his partner and their infant child, but the sensitivities around them being from Manly meant national media did not cover it.

Some children in Manly can’t make it to preschool without being molested, raped, starved or abused — and when infants and toddlers are violently attacked, there is no stomach in the national or taxpayer-funded media to give a full report of the issue.

PM Anthony Albanese in Alice Springs after meeting with local leaders and Chief Minister Natasha Fyles this week. Picture: Liam Mendes

Security footage from Manly at night could be a scene from an apocalyptic blockbuster. Residents are selling up in Manly, flooding the market, but there are few buyers.

Politicians and journalists, even the Prime Minister, have been flying into Manly from their faraway offices in Perth to analyse the situation and have put it down to intergenerational trauma from convict days.

It’s hard to get people to go to Manly to teach or work in hospitals, not just because they could have their car stolen and their house broken into, but because it’s heartwrenching. Instead, they’ll teach in Perth, where the crime is not so bad, and the money is about the same.

Insuring the same car in Manly costs four times what it costs with the same insurer in Perth.

Minister Linda Burney suggested that a Voice for Manly would have averted the situation.

A man is arrested in Alice Springs. Picture: Liam Mendes

Yet Manly had been screaming until its throat burned, the mayor, council, and the standing committee, which just held sessions in Manly, heard submissions from Manly, and all the while, the rates of domestic, family and sexual violence soared.

Why would a different advisory body be heard when local, state and federal advocates were ignored until it became utter chaos?

The voice they do have is rejected by those who wish to wrap issues of crime — and violent and sexual assault of a child is the worst kind — into a matter of generational trauma.

What’s come out of Manly is calls for stronger laws enforced by the courts and removal of acquisition by criminals of alcohol.

What’s come out of Perth is a Voice for Manly, changing Australia’s national day and a new $70 million art gallery.

If it was the Mayor of Manly and not Alice Springs, who months ago begged before a federal standing committee, “every day that this goes on, we’re a day closer to a kid killing themselves in a car accident or killing another innocent person in Alice Springs or a child being killed by a parent, big brother or sister who was intruding into their property”, if it were the Northern Beaches Council and not Alice Springs that had declared “the level of crime and anti-social behaviour was at emergency levels” in July last year, if they called for this another seven times, and were still ignored it would be the only item on the news.

The story of “Manly” is the story of Alice Springs.

Young Indigenous Australians on the street late at night in Alice Springs. Picture: Liam Mendes

Rinse and repeat, it is also the story of Tennant Creek, Katherine, parts of Townsville, parts of Cairns, Darwin and Dubbo, Palm Island, Walgett, Brewarrina, the Cape, Moree, and so many more — but where this would not be tolerated for a second is the leafy or beachy suburbs within the nation’s capitals where most of the politicians and journalists reside.

If this weren’t happening in Garbutt, Mooroobool, or Alice Springs but in Hunters Hill, Yarralumla and Bondi, it would dominate every headline.

Those who live in a different world speak whimsically about the acknowledgment of the country on Zoom meetings, barely audible over their indoor waterfalls, instead of dealing with child neglect, assault, hunger and kids going to school to sleep without the threat of family violence, but the trauma suffered by today’s children will be an issue we will be dealing with in 10 to 15 years.

Alice Springs voices say the big issue is lack of employment — because people haven’t been to school and their home life was neglectful and abusive.

Alice Springs voices believe Sydney and Canberra solutions sanitise their issues and try to solve them with face-painting and fetes.

Residents want the enforcement of the law in line with the crime. They want education and jobs. They want an audit, so the billions of dollars of government funding must have proven outcomes instead of regional organisations refusing to work with each other properly because they might snaffle up their competitors’ government grants.

Alice Springs mayor Matt Paterson.

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.

Alice Springs Mayor Matt Paterson and Alice Springs-based Senator Jacinta Price have been the authentic voice on the ground, but the eastern states where the bulk of activists, journalists and politicians live didn’t like what they were saying.

I returned to the regional community I was born in on Christmas Eve, where a group of barefoot kids, including a little girl as young as five, only wearing an oversized T-shirt, wandered the dimly lit streets.

I was heaving my son to emergency care, sidestepping broken bottles scattered down the footpath, and even though he was screaming and she was quiet, you worry more about the girl with no shoes and no mum around and probably no Christmas.

We must stop worrying about offending naive sensibilities, stop dividing over some future advisory body that is an apparent cure-all, and listen to their voice now.