We must stop looking away when kids are raped

Tragedies usually receive a vast amount of attention. An earthquake, a volcanic eruption, bushfire, flood or an avalanche will be reported across the globe. The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami was news for months. Unfortunately, the small tragedies happening frequently in outback Aboriginal communities receive little, if any, coverage.

For those of us living comfortable suburban lives, ugly home truths are too easily pushed into the background. News editors, aware of our dislike for the disreputable and the disgraceful, can be complicit in keeping us from be­ing confronted the evil inherent in these incidents.

Recently we have seen a spate of deaths from syphilis in northern Australia. A disease most of us thought had been defeated decades ago has come back, killing babies and making mothers ill. A disease that can be cured with a 10-day antibiotics course is claiming lives in our First World nation.

Along with syphilis I can think of no greater evil than child sexual abuse. But we mostly choose to turn away from it, and as long as this conspiracy of silence holds sway, these deaths, these little tragedies, will continue unabated.

Now we are confronted once again by the ugliest crime that can be committed by humankind, and it is on the rise — the rape of children, indeed babies. A few weeks ago there was the rape of a two-year-old girl in Tennant Creek, and this week there was another unspeakable crime. Not far from Tennant Creek, a four-year-old boy was raped by a teenage predator. The Labor member for Tennant Creek argues we are once again looking away while the locals look around for the perpetrator. In fact, we’ve been doing that for six decades.

So little progress has been made in tackling this problem. Labor and Liberal governments have both failed. Aboriginal activists appear to be more likely to demonstrate about stopping Australia Day than about the destruction of their communities.

Those who feed off Aboriginal communities rarely mention drugs or alcohol, yet these are so often precursors to such sexual abuse. These people are as culpable as white Australians in this generational cover-up. They speak only of the faults of white colonials during the past couple of hundred years rather than really tell unaware and uninterested Australians just how critical the problem of child sexual abuse is in their communities.

The only time we hear from our political bodies is when tragedies such as those referred to above make news. They race to send investigators off to Tennant Creak and they will write reports that will gather dust like the hundreds written before them.

Children cannot be protected while their parents lie around drunk or high. In 1993, I accompanied the night patrol in the Territory town of Katherine. There, a bunch of good people drive around in the early hours, picking up beaten and broken women and delivering them to the safety of protected beds so their wounds can be dressed and they can sleep off last night’s grog and its inevitable accompaniment, the drunken violence of men.

I wonder if that service is still going. I am guilty too because I should know the answer to that. I, like most of us, just haven’t had the time to check on a question when I thought I might not like the answer. The days of simply copping what the activists are pushing are, I hope, well and truly over. I also well remember how the cabinet in which I served was hoodwinked over the concept of “secret women’s business”. We were guilty of halting the Hindmarsh Bridge work for the wrong reasons. I learned that you don’t really show compassion by giving in to the wishes of any ethnic group that makes too much noise.

The billions poured into the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission with high hopes were squandered by crooks and thieves (including paid white advisers) and the squabbling among individuals to control the flow of cash from a government awash with concern but lacking the will to impose proper governance on the spending.

You will note that despite this latest catastrophic failure, not one head has rolled. The Territory minister responsible for the protection of these children is still in the job. The bureaucrats in charge of the department continue to hold their jobs. The losers are the children whose mistreatment should be the shame of the nation.

Finding the root cause of this malaise is something that has eluded us since Captain Arthur Phillip. It seems obvious that paying people to do nothing just doesn’t work. I can hear the howls from those who will brand me a racist for saying this, but the hopelessness that flows from knowing there is no prospect of you getting a job, and that you don’t need to anyway, must be a huge contributing factor in drunkenness and drug taking.

Rather than just give up and keep paying the dole, we need to work out how to increase job opportunities in the north. Leaving things as they are isn’t working.

If, as I have read, the family of the two-year-old was well known to police, then should we risk the outcry of another stolen generation or continue to allow children to remain in situations where they are in constant danger? I would not care what I was called if taking a child away from an unsafe environment was to save that child from rape. There are babies being raped. These are crimes too horrible to be contemplated.

What would happen, I wonder, if they were white children living in suburbia. They would be taken from their homes in a flash and there would be no outcry. Let’s stop fearing the branding and the name-calling and start saving these little lives.