OPINION: Alice Springs youth crime bus rumour a clue to town’s peculiar mindset

A persistent baffling rumour about where all Alice Springs’ ‘juvenile delinquents’ have seemingly disappeared to is emblematic of a peculiar Red Centre mindset, writes Jason Walls.

If ever there was a town built on shifting sands, it’s the Northern Territory’s Red Centre capital of Alice Springs.

Almost everyone you speak to in the Territory’s second city will tell you - as an article of faith - that every time a big wig touches down from Darwin or Canberra, “someone” secretly buses away all the town’s troubled youth — where and why, none can say.

Despite the existence of not a single shred of evidence to support this theory, and its general implausibility, arguing the toss with a Centralian is akin to walking into a church and trying to have a reasoned discussion about the possibility that God might not actually exist.

Let’s break it down — first of all, what would anyone possibly have to gain from this?

As Mayor Matt Paterson told news.com.au last week, it would be in the council’s interest for the Prime Minister and Chief Minister to see first hand the issues it has been raising.

Then there’s just the patent absurdity of the type of deep state conspiracy that would be required to pull it off undetected.

Police officers chat with a man in the Todd Mall in Alice Springs. Picture: Mark Brake

These are the same kids supposedly terrorising the streets night after night, with even the police powerless to bring them under control, and the same kids who post videos of themselves ramming cop cars with stolen vehicles to social media.

And yet they were somehow quietly herded onto a series of buses without a peep and not one of them remembered to bring their phone so they could post photos of the trip to Facebook?

Everyone I spoke to in Alice Springs over the past couple of weeks is in furious agreement that the town’s ongoing crime crisis is the worst it’s ever been and only getting worse.

Even in the absence of formal statistics, this sort of thing might ordinarily be considered strong anecdotal evidence that the town has a serious problem warranting drastic action.

But in a place where the lines between reality and fantasy are so blurred and illusory, it’s hard to get a solid grip on what’s real and what’s imagined.

The most stark physical insight into the Centralian mindset came on January 25, when contractors spent the day erecting eight-foot fences around the council lawns in preparation for the next day’s Australia Day events.

It was the first time I’d seen any such thing at any Australia Day event anywhere in Australia and by 10am on January 26 it became abundantly clear the whole exercise was a complete waste of time and money.

Alice Springs Mayor Matt Paterson inspects the honour guard during the Australia Day flag raising and citizenship ceremony on the council lawns. Picture Mark Brake

The small, perfectly behaved crowd was certainly no threat to anyone and nor was there any threat to them from outside the wire, so what was the fencing actually for?

It’s hard to draw any other conclusion than that the fencing did in fact serve its purpose, which was to protect the good citizens of Alice Springs from the most pernicious assailant of all, the terror of their own imagination.

The most sensible observation might have even come from one of the dreaded youths themselves, a teenage boy I spoke to who told me the whole thing had been “blown out of proportion”.

“I don’t think it’s as bad as the media makes it out to be,” he said.

“It’s not good seeing young fellas running around the streets at night, throwing rocks, but it’s not as bad as they say.”

To be clear, there is no doubt Alice Springs, like every town and city in Australia, has a crime problem, but in a place where rumour and innuendo rule over evidence and reason, gauging the extent of it is next to impossible.