Taking on drink violence: ‘nobody’s got the nuts to do anything’

Alcohol-fuelled violence, often involving children, has plunged the towns of Port Hedland and South Hedland into crisis.

A man lifts a teenager by her hair and dumps her into a shopping trolley after an attack in which her leg was broken.

The sight is confronting — a drunken man staggers upright and, after looking down at the prone young woman lying next to him on the pavement, stomps on her outstretched leg.

Later in the night her leg will be shown to be broken. Meanwhile, the man lifts the teenager by her hair and drops her limp body roughly into a shopping trolley.

Watching the scene via CCTV is a police officer on duty whose job is to monitor the cameras in the asphalt­ desert that is the South Hedland shopping centre.

Alcohol-fuelled violence such as this, often involving drunk children, has plunged the Pilbara iron ore towns of Port Hedland and South Hedland into crisis.

Assaults have become so common, including in broad daylight and in front of shoppers and their kids, that the local council’s milit­ary-grade surveillance cameras are an indispensable polic­ing tool. Sometime over the past year, as the rate of assaults doubled in South Hedland, Superintendent Ricky Chadwick told colleagues: “We cannot arrest our way out of this problem.”

Now the state’s outspoken police commissioner Karl O’Callaghan has stepped in. With only a few months left in what he has said will be his last term in the top job, Mr O’Callaghan is in what may be his last battle with the powerful Australian Hotels Association.

He has asked the state director of liquo­r licensing, Barry Sargeant, for the most severe alcohol restrictions the hard-drinking Pilbara has ever seen: a ban on the bottleshop sales of full-strength beer and pre-mixed drinks.

Also, a ban on bottleshops selling to taxi drivers, a regular practice in which Centrelink recipients send drivers to collect alcohol.

Soon after payday they are broke and their kids, many of them Abori­ginal, are hungry and roaming town at night.

CCTV stills show a 17-year-old South Hedland boy violently attacking a 14-year-old girl before police turn up: such vision has become a vital policing tool.

CCTV stills show a 17-year-old South Hedland boy violently attacking a 14-year-old girl before police turn up: such vision has become a vital policing tool.

CCTV stills show a 17-year-old South Hedland boy violently attacking a 14-year-old girl before police turn up: such vision has become a vital policing tool.

In the wide-ranging request, police have also asked for fewer trading hours. The Weekend Australian has been told this is because people have been clocked drinking three cartons of beer each on the days when they have money — they buy their first carton at 11am, return mid-afternoon for their ­second then purchase a third just before closing time.

Some residents are furious that they will be inconvenienced becau­se of a relative few.

The AHA’s West Australian chief executive, Bradley Woods, points out that local licensees have already initiated harm-minimisation measures such as selling no more than one carton of full-strength beer a day to any one person.

Port Hedland Mayor Camillo Blanco says that is not working. “The stuff that’s gone on here is not the sort of stuff that should be going on in a first-world country,” he said. “Nobody’s got the nuts to actual­ly do anything about it.”

Last week he showed clips from his council’s CCTV footage to representatives from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. They were shocked as they watched a drunk 17-year-old boy bashing a drunk 14-year-old girl in the street. They were both Aboriginal. Mr Blanco says he does not care if he alienates liquor store owners and “do good’’ Aboriginal workers. “What we’re seeing on those videos is the destruction of a whole generation of people,” he said.