Four Corners’ NT justice story exemplar of mainstream media

The media takeout from the astounding Four Corners program on Monday night and the royal commission into juvenile justice in the Northern Territory announced Tuesday morning has to be this: mainstream media is more important to our nation continent in the age of Twitter and 24-hour current affairs television than it has ever been.

Never has there been more media to less effect. Millions of words were written and spoken this week about the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre and the five children whose plight was highlighted in closed-circuit television footage aired on the ­program.

It took until Thursday night’s brilliant interview by Sky News political editor David Speers ­before any journalist outside the NT showed any real sign of grasping just how much rubbish had been spoken about the issue since Monday, especially by NT Chief Minister Adam Giles.

While the Four Corners program did a brilliant job pulling the story together, it contained little new about the plight of Dylan Voller and the other children in NT detention.

Journalists on talking heads programs all week sniggered at the standard of reporting out of Darwin, but none until Speers seemed to realise everything Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was reacting to when he announced his Royal Commission on AM on ABC Radio on Tuesday morning had been reported at length and many times by the ABC in Darwin, the Northern ­Territory News, The Australian and The Guardian.

Even the footage of prison guards assaulting a then 13-year-old Voller and stripping him naked was run in an exclusive by Anthony Stewart on the ABC website on December 19, 2014. The NT Children’s Commission report by Howard Bath that described Monday night’s incidents in detail was discussed by the NT Government in 2014 but suppressed. Unfortunately many journalists tried to get Bath to leak the report but he refused and instead managed to get a letter about his findings tabled in the NT parliament.

Bath rejected the Territory government’s review of the juvenile justice system and called two years ago for a full-blown inquiry into withholding of evidence, lies by prison staff to the Children’s Commission, including in statutory declarations, and a lack of proper training for prison staff.

And it is not just the Bath ­report. Giles also has findings by Bath’s successor as Children’s Commissioner, Colleen Gwynne, last year and by NSW Juvenile Justice Commissioner Michael Vita in January 2015. Giles this week feigned shock at the events, but he has known the details for years.

The Guardian has given much credit for Monday night’s program to senior Darwin journalist Kate Wild, the partner of Jonathon Hunyor, the former senior legal officer at the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency based at Charles Darwin University and appointed CEO of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre in Sydney in June this year.

But history is unlikely to give her or the Darwin bureau of the ABC the credit they deserve, and Lateline’s Emma Alberici on Friday night interviewed Hunyor without even mentioning Wild or their relationship.

In many ways the media issue about big stories outside southeastern Australia is similar to the celebrated Chris Masters Four Corners program “The Moonlight State” in 1987. Masters’ piece won national acclaim, but many people outside Queensland did not realise Courier-Mail journalist Phil Dickie won the Gold Walkley that year for his work on Queensland corruption.

It was Dickie, his brilliant chief of staff and later Brisbane Sunday Mail editor Bob Gordon and the Courier’s then editor Greg Chamberlain who did all the hard yards. Many such stories go nowhere without a large national media organisation pulling them together for a national audience.

It can be dispiriting for those who have done the hard yards over many years but it is far better than that hard work not achieving its potential. Remember to his eternal shame the persecution by former Media Watch presenter Stuart Littlemore of Illawarra Mercury editor Peter Cullen who was proved right about paedophile networks in Wollongong.

Contrast this on-the-ground journalism with the Tuesday morning sneering of non-journalist and Crikey political editor ­Bernard Keane who on Twitter impugned the country’s best journalist, asking if that “grub Paul Kelly” would oppose this royal commission as he had the national commission into child sexual abuse set up by Julia Gillard.

That is what passes for political comment on Twitter, which then drives much of the degraded online news media. Consider the fate of the serious journalists who have been doing their work in the NT. As The Australian’s NT correspondent Amos Aikman told me on Thursday morning: “The common feeling among them (journalists) is of yelling into a void. The NT is such a weak and immature jurisdiction with so many problems that things just fall through the cracks.”

The best discussion I have ever read about the politics and media of the NT was written by Nicolas Rothwell and published in this paper under the headline, “The Failed State” on October 24, 2009.

Everyone really should read it.

A couple of facts stand out: that year the NT government employed 109 journalists, far more than the number working in all other media in the Territory. Second, of the NT’s annual budget that year of $4 billion only a fifth was “own source”. The rest came via the GST and federal payments.

Barry Hansen, the former president of the NT Council of ­Social Service, showed the Territory was underspending on Aboriginal welfare by $500 million a year. Much of the NT’s federal funding is linked to the 40 per cent of the Territory’s population that is indigenous.

As The Australian has commented for decades, Darwin is a company town. The company is the NT government. Federal money meant for degraded Aboriginal communities goes to service providers in the bureaucracy. The business of the government is growth linked to population rise and property development.

The success of the politics of development relies on harnessing ill-will to the indigenous population to sew up the white vote in Darwin and Palmerston. Bush members are ignored, hence their regular defections across the chamber.