Behind Dawson’s back, the clean-living top cop was spoken about as a zealous teetotal who made dinner guests leave their wine on the veranda of his home. This wasn’t true. There is at least one confirmed sighting of him drinking a real beer at an AFL grand final.
The former head of the Australian Crime Commission had made a link between the gross oversupply of alcohol in Australia’s remote north and the extreme and normalised violence in Aboriginal communities.
That link was plain in a highly confidential report he oversaw at the ACC, and he saw it again when he returned to WA as the police commissioner.
He was not bothered if anyone thought he was on a doomed crusade.
Perhaps he knew his request was never going to succeed. He made it anyway, with hundreds of pages of grim evidence that forced a lengthy investigation by the director of liquor licensing.
His submission, obtained by The Australian but never made public, is upsetting reading. In Mr Dawson’s submission about alcohol-related harm in the Pilbara, Robby Chibawe, chief executive of the Puntukumu Aboriginal Medical Service, is quoted saying: “Pregnant women are still drinking even after education about the effects and find birthing FASD children easier due to their smaller size.
“Target testing in one community ascertained out of 20 children, 16 were diagnosed with FASD. These children are so damaged they will never recover.”
Chibawe’s dossier also includes a confidential report by Indigenous leader Marcia Langton and colleagues from the University of Melbourne, who interviewed 66 residents and frontline workers in and near Kununurra and describe “the shocking extent, gravity and normalisation of violence for the Indigenous community”. They concluded alcohol was recurrent, ever-present and exacerbating, and so did Dawson.
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There was shock – and mirth – when word got out that Western Australia’s police commissioner, Chris Dawson, was attempting to close down every bottle shop in the northwest of the nation. It was laughable, people said, that any government would even think of doing this to the resource sector workers who make it rain money in the west.