Steve Price: Voice to Parliament won’t fix Alice Springs ‘war zone’

Forty years after the royals toured Alice Springs nothing has changed — and it’s rubbish to blame non-Indigenous Australians for the “war zone” it has become.

In March it will be 40 years since King Charles and his young wife Princess Diana landed in Alice Springs for the start of a six-week tour.

It was just 15 days after Bob Hawke belted Malcolm Fraser in an election smashing and a matter of weeks after the deadly Ash Wednesday bushfires.

The Alice always seemed like an odd place to start a royal tour featuring the most famous woman in the world, Diana.

Forty years on and Alice Springs and the Northern Territory are back in the news for the very worst of reasons. Grog bans have been lifted by a left-leaning delusional NT Labor government and the results are clear to see.

Alice Springs has been described as a “war zone” and adolescent Indigenous children are roaming the streets committing violent crimes.

I reference 1983 for one reason: I covered that Royal Tour and then went back to report on, guess what, youth crime in Alice Springs and places like Tennant Creek and Yuendumu, 400km northwest of Alice Springs.

Forty years ago! And nothing has changed.

Diana Princess of Wales and Prince Charles in front of Ayers Rock in 1983. Picture: Getty Images

Let’s be clear, given what’s unfolded this week around the frightening crime wave involving youngsters in the Alice including home invasions, car theft and robbery, the Voice referendum and debate is the last thing these people need.

You don’t need a Voice – whatever that might end up being – you need the parents of these children, some reportedly as young as five, to stop getting drunk and bashing each other and making their own children scared to be at home.

We need the parents of these kids to start taking their own responsibility for having children and ask themselves at 2am where those children are and what are they doing.

Blaming non-Indigenous Australians for the s--tshow Alice Springs has become and suggesting that’s why we need a Voice – as the left has tried to do late this week – is rubbish.

How can creating some other body of Aboriginal lobbying that hasn’t existed over the 40 years I mentioned prevent the social breakdown that’s taken the headlines this week?

On that 1983 visit I got there a few days before the royal couple because of a flood event that turned the normally dry Todd River into a torrent of water.

Blaming non-Indigenous Australians for the s--tshow Alice Springs has become and suggesting that’s why we need a Voice is rubbish.

It meant Charles and Di stayed at the Gap Motel because they couldn’t get to their suite at the casino. It also meant residents of the town camps in the Todd had to relocate to the centre of the CBD.

Walking through the main street two days before the royals got there and witnessing the booze-driven violence is something that’s stayed with me until today.

Bottle shops were shuttered behind steel cages, and you didn’t even think about walking into a pub.

Violence – men on men and women on women, and gutless blokes abusing women around fires lit in the street and parks – was part of life.

It wasn’t young kids being violent but probably their grandparents.

This was 40 years ago, and we are asked to believe in 2023 that ticking a YES box on a referendum will fix all this.

Forty years ago at Ayers Rock, Charles was 34, and his wife Diana was just 22. Prince William was a baby.

Embarrassingly our new PM was shamed this week into flying there for a few hours and a photo opportunity. Picture: Liam Mendes

Forty years we have had to fix Alice Springs and its remote communities, and somehow a referendum is going to do that by creating a Voice. No one believes that.

Embarrassingly our new PM was shamed this week into flying there for a few hours and a photo opportunity.

He needed to be seen to be doing something – anything.

It was the same with the forgettable Malcolm Turnbull who back in 2018 when confronted by the horrific case involving the rape of a two-year-old girl flew to Tennant Creek, four hours north of Alice Springs.

The sexual assault took place in a part of town called The Bronx and authorities had been warned this child was at risk.

In the wake of the rape, 15 at-risk children were taken away from their families.

That was just five years ago.

Just five years ago, 15 at-risk children were removed from their families.

Fast forward and at least PM Albanese went, but you suspect this is as much about saving his promise of delivering the Voice as about concerns for the people living in Alice Springs.

It’s a town, we learnt this week, where Woolworths closes at 7pm after a kid shut it down with a machete, and where deodorant, mouthwash and hand sanitiser are sold from locked cupboards because of juvenile abuse.

It’s a community where the NT’s Labor government believes limiting alcohol sales to Indigenous people is racist but where BWS says you can buy two slabs of beer, half a dozen bottles of wine at a time and a 750ml bottle of spirits. That’s each.

What a joke, so explain to me exactly how a Voice to Parliament is going to make any difference to any of this, 40 years on from that royal visit.

By the way, on that same visit, we went to Tennant Creek and if you google that visit you will see pretty pictures of Diana and Charles with schoolchildren, some of them Indigenous.

We were told, though, that this troubled town had organised a free barbecue with grog outside town for the large Indigenous population to clean up the local streets and hide their problem.

There were reports on talkback radio from Alice locals this week that very same thing happened during the Albanese visit.

Some things never change, and it’s unlikely a three-hour visit, more money splashed around and the Voice will make things any better in another 40 years.