Alice Springs youth curfew extended for school holidays

The Northern Territory government has extended a curfew on children in Alice Springs and says it will continue to serve as security at bottleshops in three troubled towns.

NT Chief Minister Eva Lawler has extended the two-week youth curfew in Alice Springs for a further five days. Picture: Pema Tamang Pakhrin

The Northern Territory government has extended a curfew on children in Alice Springs and says it will continue to serve as security at bottleshops in three troubled Northern Territory towns despite a review that recommends getting rid of them.

The Lawler Labor government extended the two-week youth curfew for a further five days, meaning it will expire at the end of the school holidays.

It was implemented at the end of March after months of chaos in Alice Springs culminated in a riot then a fight involving more than 100 people who also attacked police. The curfew will now expire at 6am next Tuesday.

On Tuesday, NT Chief Minister Eva Lawler reported that it was working as a circuit-breaker.

Ms Lawler will expand the Northern Territory Police Force by 200 officers following a review of its resourcing and functions that found understaffing was rife.

In the remote Aboriginal community of Gunbalanya, the review found, the local police station was permanently short-staffed because there was not enough housing in the community for the required number of officers.

In Gunbalanya, population 1300, one female Aboriginal liaison officer and one police academy graduate with four months’ work experience were the only police. They were responsible for 1300 residents and 22,000sq km, and had each worked 18 hours on their last rostered day off.

When the review team visited, the two women were dealing with days of community unrest, working a lot of overtime and had a backlog of 40 police jobs. They were tired in part because they had spent five days the week before in extreme heat to help search for a missing person in Kakadu National Park.

“The police review shows that there needs to be significant increases to resourcing for the NT Police Force,” Ms Lawler said.

“It also shows that the organisational structure needs to improve and there is a need for more support from the government to our frontline police.

“I’m confident that we have the right Commissioner and the right Police Minister in place to make sure that the report recommendations are implemented in full.”

However, the government will not accept every recommendation. The review urges the government to end the practice of supplying auxiliary police to man the doors at bottleshops in Alice Springs, Katherine and Tennant Creek.

The review found that while there was a belief these officers were reducing crime, there was no clear evidence to support that. In fact, alcohol-related crime had increased since the practice began.

“The cost of providing a secure and lawful takeaway premises should be borne by the individual or company profiting from that business,” the review, published on Tuesday, states.

One of the duties of officers assigned to bottleshops is to ask patrons for their ID. This includes checking the addresses of customers to make sure they do not live in a community where it is against the law to drink alcohol. It is up to the officers to determine if the patron intends to consume the alcohol in a restricted area.

The People’s Alcohol Action Coalition is strongly in favour of the practice. It said there was preventable harm in March when some of the auxiliary officers went to Darwin for training and not all bottleshops were manned.

The organisation, which documents alcohol-related harm and alcohol policies in the NT, supports blanket measures in Alice Springs it believes would serve to reduce sales to problem drinkers.

“It is now time to introduce even stronger measures on alcohol. This includes volumetric sales limits similar to what are in place in Tennant Creek with exemptions for station owners, some tourist operators and others on special requests,” it said.

The NT has a banned drinkers register but the coalition believes it must be strengthened. For example, it wants ensuring all people admitted to a sobering-up shelter to be automatically placed on the register.

“People should be placed on the banned drinkers register for longer periods of up to two years with the ability to come off early if they successfully engage in alcohol treatment,” it said.