Dear Editor,
“The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable.” This quote was attributed to Mahatma Ghandi.
But he did not say it – he said something close, but not that. I will bet he wished he had. I wish I had.
I have been motivated by that goal always, even though I may not have been able to express it in words seventy years ago.
The annual Closing the Gap Report on Indigenous disadvantage tabled in the Australian Parliament paints a dimmer picture year after year. We are going backwards. The results are shameful.
The finger pointing, blame shedding, continues year after year, decade after decade. Blame colonialism, blame the theft of a continent. Even blame the victims.
Yet governments at all levels continue with the same failing policies, expecting that next year we will get a different result.
What are the prospects of radical redirection? If the government was brave, what are the prospects of the Senate passing the necessary legislation?
A former Northern Territory attorney-general once said something along the lines, “The commonwealth creates this problem, and it is left to the Northen Territory to mop up.”
I reckon I know what he meant.
I think he meant ‘free money’ from a generous framework of welfare support, kids not going to school, foetal alcohol syndrome in kids, idle parents.
So how are we measuring up?
We can paint one side of the picture.
Vehicle theft is endemic and the culprits post videos of their escapades, such is their disdain for the law.
Brazen theft from service stations and shops and suburban grocery stores is endemic.
Home invasion is frequent.
Break and enters of family homes and businesses are at record levels.
A considerable number of these offences occur when the alleged perpetrator is on bail. Often on repeat bail
The victims of these offences are extremely angry at the courts.
Public anger at the extent of the use of bail is livid.
Public rage around a belief that penalties imposed by a court are too soft for the crime is volcanic.
All of this creates a pressure cooker demand for mandatory sentencing – for the parliament to take away the discretion of the courts, and to specify the penalties to apply.
Now let us look at the other side.
The rate of imprisonment of Indigenous peoples is our national and international shame.
The cost of incarcerating someone is excruciatingly high.
Studies in various parts of the world show jailing is also ineffective – recidivism is high.
There is also a terrible ongoing social cost to family and community – family disruption, breadwinner missing, raising children.
Correctional Services is a fanciful title. There is no ‘correction’, few ‘services,’ and little training.
People are jailed in the NT for offences that would not result in a custodial sentence interstate.
The age of criminal responsibility in the NT is 10. It is 15 in Denmark, 16 in China.
Over 40 per cent of our jail population are on remand – they have not yet been before a court.
And they are there for unacceptably long stays because of logjams.
The logjams result from inadequate funding of the police, the Director of Public Prosecutions, legal aid services, and the courts.
It is not easy being in government.
You need to map a policy path that: appeases the public; reduces crime; addresses our national and international shame about our incarceration rates of Indigenous peoples; overcomes the stigma of jailing children; reduces the overcrowding in our jails; eliminates the head-in-the-sand approach of building more jails at eye-watering cost; helps reign in our ever-growing budget deficit, with our per capita debt the highest of all states and territories.
It is even harder to govern for all.
The new Northern Territory government has been true to its election promises in respect of law and order, getting tough on crime. It has legislated to reduce the age of criminal responsibility and toughen bail laws.
These measures have stretched the police, and the courts, and the budget, and filled the watch houses and the jails. Victims are likely to be appreciative of these measures and are demanding more.
But what about the people who commit crime?
Do they even know what Mahatma Ghandi is alleged to have said?
Do they know about their comparative incarceration rates?
Do they know about the Closing the Gap annual report?
What they do know is that they are not sharing equally in the fruits of the nation.
They also pass down vivid oral histories of their treatment since the arrival of the colonisers.
Again, how do we measure up on the treatment of our ‘most vulnerable?
The future?
Investing in more police, more courts, more jails is an eye-wateringly costly approach to an endemic. On this trajectory, history will keep on repeating itself. We are on a path to insolvency.
Where is the investment on preventative measures in our recently announced budget? There are countless ‘justice reinvestment’ measures in other states and overseas that are claimed to have worked.
Governments must address the causes to effectively eliminate the problem, rather than just the symptoms.
The parlous state of our finances, and our social fabric, demand that we try something different. Something that creates hope.
The Australian government cannot turn away from their part in this social crisis.
Bob Beadman, Darwin
If you want your letter to the editor published send it to ntindependent@protonmail.com. Please include your name, address and phone number for verification. We will only publish your name and suburb or town. We do reserve the right to edit the letter for length and clarity purposes. PRIVACY POLICY: You can find our privacy policy by clicking here.
‘A former Northern Territory attorney-general once said something along the lines, “The commonwealth creates this problem, and it is left to the Northern Territory to mop up.”
I reckon I know what he meant.’
~That’s a complete cop out Bob. The NT chooses how it spends its money from the Commonwealth. If politicians were actually interested in trying to fix the deeply entrenched crime problem they would have Justice Reinvestment at the heart of their crime and social policies.
Ask the real experts in the field instead of brainlessly spewing out “tough on crime” when they know it doesn’t work.
Another cop out is saying “that’s what the voters want”. We don’t give alcoholics more vodka, nor problem gamblers more money and a free taxi to the pokies, so why give the voters more people in prison when any semi-serious analysis of this strategy around the world shows that it obviously doesn’t work.
The murder rate statistics in American states with the death penalty are higher than in states which don’t have the death penalty. There is no tougher on crime sentence than death. It doesn’t deter criminals primarily because most criminals never think they are going to be caught when they commit their crime.
From an article by ‘Death Penalty Info’ group in the USA titled:
‘Murder Rate of Death Penalty States Compared to Non-Death Penalty States’, they report:
The murder rate in non-death penalty states has remained consistently lower than the rate in states with the death penalty, and the gap has grown since 1990.
I knew an NT bush school teacher of many years. She complained that the ‘teaching in English’ policy wasn’t working because the students didn’t understand English in the first place. She tried to advocate for English to be taught as a second language, as it is around the world, and was flatly rebuffed by so-called Education Dept experts.
Imagine trying to learn Mongolian by sitting in front of Mongolian TV listening to it all day and trying to make sense of it.
She then asked if the standardised testing done every 2 years around Australia could be translated into local languages.
When it’s given in English it functions as an English test first, a maths test second. However if you can’t understand the words in the question then you can’t answer the question.
She was again rebuffed by those same ‘experts’ for it being too hard to do and not fair to other non-English speakers.
So she translated some of the maths questions into the local language of her students and they got full marks in quick time. They understood the concepts but not the English.
But those ‘expert’ testers marked her students’ work and gave them a big fat zero.
She also said that when she was a student teacher, she was told by her instructors: if the students aren’t learning in your class, that’s the responsibility of the teacher. It’s your job to craft lessons which give your students the best chance of learning, in all the different ways that happens.
She and our house both agree with that but we blame the Government’s instructions to the teachers of using only English.
Is it any wonder kids don’t want to go to schools like that?
NT used to have a functioning and enviable bilingual education program in the 70s and 80s.
It was a political decision to shut it down, we believe in order to dumb down Aboriginal people. They knew it was working too well. Can’t have an informed and literate First Nations population, they might start challenging us in our own language.
There’s a decent article on the ABC about that here:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-26/nt-bilingual-education-features/102749508
So if you want to educate people, not just Aboriginal people, then there are ways to do it, to lift them up, to include them, to give them confidence, to share Western knowledge, to encourage book reading, etc.
But if you don’t want to do any of that then there are ways to do that too, as you can see around you.
Think about this too: constant reminders of colonisers benefitting off of your stolen land, The Stolen Generation, a general denigration of culture, shocking levels of deaths in custody, over representation in prisons, (some) racist Police, a generation of illiterate young people which means they have little chance of finding employment of any description, suffering terrible levels of poverty and horrendously bad health outcomes, and then on top of that they are blamed for “being idle” or being “alcoholics”.
Is it any wonder?!!!!
Other countries have had success stories in their own fights against crime. It only takes 10 minutes to search online and then a week or so to read all the reports and articles about how they did it and how well it is working now.
If, as a Government, you haven’t spent this much research time doing the same as we’ve done as a small household, then you are deliberately not doing it.
This means you don’t actually want to fix any of these problems.
It’s also known as: wilful blindness.
Ignoring the root causes of crime – hint: they’re the same the world over – just type in ‘root causes of crime’ to an Internet search page and read the answers, is purposefully letting people destroy their own lives as well as the victims of crime’s lives.
You say: “The Australian Government cannot turn away from their part in this social crisis.”
We say: “They already have.”