Petrol sniffing ‘cry for help’ by desperate kids: NT coroner

Aboriginal girls were sniffing petrol so they could get admitted to rehabilitation and escape the troub­led Arnhem Land community of Yirrkala, NT Coroner told.

Northern Territory Chief Health Officer Hugh Heggie and Top End Health Service mental health general manager Richard Campion leave Darwin Local Court after a day of hearings into petrol sniffing in the Northern Territory.

Aboriginal girls were sniffing petrol so they could get admitted to rehabilitation and escape the troub­led Arnhem Land community of Yirrkala in what the Northern Territory Coroner has been told was a “massive red flag” that agencies missed.

On the second day of his evidence, the senior bureaucrat in charge of mental health, alcohol and drug-treatment programs, Richard Campion, conceded that neither he nor his staff understood the law and guidelines relevant to their work.

His department had on many occasions wrongly closed volatile substance-abuse cases for children as young as 11 who desperately needed help, failed to keep proper records, incorrectly assumed no reports of sniffing meant kids were safe and used that as an excuse to “monitor” vulnerable patients off its books.

The department wrongly ended the assessment of a 17-year-old girl, known as Ms B, who had twice been sexually assaulted, engaged in self-harm, threatened suicide, said she would “rather die” than go back to Yirrkala and begged for help, deeming her not to be at high risk.

Two weeks later, Ms B got into a drunken argument at Yirrkala with her brother and stabbed him in the back and stomach. A community night patrol vehicle took her home, where she hanged herself, the inquest was told.

The information about Aboriginal girls deliberately sniffing was recorded on her file. The inquest also heard of a fight at Yirrkala between up to 150 “sniffers” and “non-sniffers” arm­ed with baseball bats and hammers.

Health Minister Natasha Fyles last night ignored questions about whether Mr Campion should be sacked and what confidence she had in his and her agency’s ongoing work.

She instead bizarrely claimed that the “Department of Health and other agencies have been co-operating with the Coroner’s investigation”, despite the inquest hearing the department avoided furnishing witness statements until the very last minute, failed to answer critical questions and treated the Coroner with disrespect verging on contempt.

The devastating inquest into three child deaths — the second such inquiry Coroner Greg Cavanagh has held in as many months — is examining the cases of 12-year-old Master W and 13-year-old Master JK in addition to that of Ms B. They died tragically, with a history of substance abuse, poor school attendance and child-protection notifications ag­ainst their names.

All were variously considered for or admitted to rehabilitation, but none ever received a proper treatment plan — something the department was legally obliged to provide for high-risk patients.

Many of the issues raised in the hearing were aired during a 2017 inquest into the death from petrol sniffing of 24-year-old Edward Laurie in 2015. That inquiry found he began sniffing at the age of 10 but did not get the help he needed. Masters W and JK and Ms B were also not adequately treated.

Mr Cavanagh bemoaned the repeated failures and recalled a 2005 inquest in the Central Australian community of Mutitjulu, during which a woman attended with her son who was sniffing from a tin of petrol hidden in his jumper.

“We are still not on top of the (petrol-sniffing) problem,” he said.

The department’s four-person team of volatile substance abuse assessors were regularly “run off their feet”, managing 50-60 cases each, the inquest was told.

The only treatment available was residential care that the department often considered undesirable. Community care amounted to “monitoring” and showing an iPad video.

Mr Cavanagh signalled he would extend the inquest until Monday if necessary to allow the department to answer long-overdue questions.

“This process is pretty damned bloody important, and the response should have been better,” he said.

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