I’m hoping to get this piece out into the wider media so any comments most welcome.
When Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin announced the quarantining of welfare payments for indigenous people would continue, ostensibly to manage alcohol abuse, as part of the NT intervention she was reflecting a belief straight out of the 1950’s. It is a belief implicit in the reasons given for welfare quarantining. In 1950’s parlance it is that ‘Abo’s can’t handle their grog,’ the inference being that non-indigenous people can.
One of the major focuses of the intervention has been alcohol abuse in indigenous communities and amongst indigenous people. Although the intervention has primarily operated in specified indigenous communities most indigenous people have been ensnared in the discourse of alcohol and indigenous people that surrounds the intervention.
A group of drunken indigenous people sitting in a park in Darwin reflects the raison d’etre for the intervention for many non-indigenous passers-by. The group may be loud, abusive, upset, and angry; surrounded by the debris of their drinking. In truth they are no different to a high proportion of NT residents. The main difference is the public spectacle versus the less public spectacle, a difference rooted in economics and culture.
The rivers of grog flowing into indigenous communities became a mantra for John Howard as he sold the intervention to the Australian people. The truth is there is an ocean of grog swirling around NT. Alcohol abuse is a way of life in NT, in fact it signifies a ‘True Territorian.’
NT has almost double the Australian average of alcohol consumption. The Australian drinking guidelines state high risk drinking for women is 5 or more standard drinks a day and for men it’s 7 standard drinks or more. That’s an after work session at the pub for the average Territorian and doesn’t include the mandatory six pack thrown in the car on the way home.
When Random Breath Testing was introduced in the NT in 1980 it was considered an infringement on the NT lifestyle by most people and elicited a host of complaints. That idea hasn’t really gone away. I live next to a pub/drive through bottle shop and the stream of cars filling up with grog hardly abates from 9:00 am till 10:00 pm. When the pub closes the screech of car tyres fills the air as drunken punters do burn outs, sometimes crashing their cars in the process.
Even the local MP’s aren’t shy about their love of alcohol. In late October 2008 a local MP was accused of being drunk in Parliament, another MP hosted a Christmas party in 2007 at his electoral office and supplied free alcohol resulting in one man collapsing and 2006 another MP, who’d been drinking all day at the cricket, made lecherously obscene comments to a woman security guard. When questioned about his behaviour he claimed he couldn’t remember making the comments.
The daily local paper, the NT News, is a litany of alcohol abuse stories and not indigenous people in communities but people in clubs, in cars or their own homes. To walk down Mitchell St, Darwin’s nightclub precinct, on any night but especially the end of the week is to run the gauntlet of alcohol soaked violence.
I drove cabs in Melbourne for ten years, trawling for fares on King St and most other night club areas and have lived in Sydney and Brisbane. I have never seen a more drunken violent environment than Mitchell St on a Friday or Saturday night. It’s not uncommon for thirty person brawls to erupt on the street when the clubs close down and the clubs themselves are a repository of violence as evidenced by the regular articles in the NT News about people being glassed, beaten unconscious, kicked to oblivion and so on. The perpetrators of this violence are generally non-indigenous locals and the occasional backpacker.
Non-indigenous locals also tend to leave the debris of their drinking and partying all over the place, much like their indigenous counterparts who drink in the parks. I recently walked to Vesteys Beach, a popular Darwin Beach. There’d been a party in the car park the night before, the car park was a carpet of broken glass and bottles and cans were strewn all over the grass. The partiers had been drinking pre-mixed drinks and spirits as well as beer, not the drink of choice for ‘long-grassers’ as itinerant indigenous people are often called. Recently there’s been a number of letters in the paper complaining of Magpie Geese hunters leaving their empty bottles and cans as well as packaging around the shores of a local wetland and other complaints of people camping at Gunn point and leaving piles of rubbish and human faeces everywhere. Magpie Goose hunting is enjoyed by many Territorians and Gunn point is popular with recreational fishermen. Neither place is known as an indigenous itinerant enclave.
The main difference between the indigenous people targeted in the intervention and everyone else, aside from their skin colour, is where they drink. Many of the indigenous people either targeted or signifying the raison d’etre for the intervention drink outside. The reasons for this are either economic; they have no house, or cultural; they prefer to be outside or they are not allowed in the family home when they drink. Many non-indigenous people will walk past the group of indigenous people drinking and arguing in a park and look at them with disdain thinking they can’t handle their drink, then go to a nightclub, get in a fight with someone, break a glass in another person’s face and drive home so pissed they can hardly see the road. And somehow they think they can handle their drink!
If the NT and Federal government want to reduce the incidents of alcohol abuse and related harm on indigenous communities they need to acknowledge that alcohol abuse is endemic in NT and that it crosses all classes, cultures and races and act on it. To target indigenous people for their problem drinking and refuse to act on problem drinking in the wider community is to legitimise one people’s drinking and criminalise another’s all because one is more visible than another. Alcohol is causing problems across the NT and obviously the impact will be greater in economically disadvantaged, socially isolated and disenfranchised communities. Indigenous people will see the double standard; that their drunken behaviour is unacceptable but everyone else’s is and is fact culturally and politically endorsed and it will only lead to resentment. The federal and NT government by perpetuating the myth that ‘Abos can’t handle their grog,’ is rubbing salt into recently opened old wounds whose scars stretch back in history.
