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DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Daniel James. This is 7am.

Alice Springs is making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Violent crimes committed by young people, including a recent shocking attack on a woman and her two month old baby, have left the town shaken.

The baby has suffered a brain bleed and a fractured skull, and there are now big questions about how to keep the community safe, what justice should look like and why crimes like this happen at all.

Today, Arrernte woman Catherine Liddle, CEO of SNAICC, the national body representing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, on the underlying issues wreaking havoc on the streets of Alice Springs and what can be done to address the youth crime crisis.

It’s Wednesday, December 18.

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DANIEL:

Catherine, thanks so much for joining us. You're a Arrernte woman. You live in Alice Springs. What's it like living there at the moment?

CATHERINE:

Yeah look, Alice Springs is my home and I'm not only Arrernte, I'm Luritja belonging to Alice Springs. I'm a Tio. I think most people from Alice Springs right now would be having a bit of trouble finding the right word. Everyone's feeling distressed, but distressed doesn't quite capture the distress we feel about the recent assaults.

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 1:

“There is an urgent cry for help tonight after the bashing of a two month old baby who's been airlifted to the Women's and Children's Hospital with a skull fracture.”

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 2:

“The infant was in her mother's arms at their home in Alice Springs when the pair was allegedly attacked by two teenage thugs with an iron bar.”

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 3:

“It's the latest in a string of violent incidents in Alice Springs in recent weeks, including the alleged rape of a woman on Saturday night while she was sleeping.”

CATHERINE:

It’s unacceptable that we're seeing a baby flown to hospital with a broken skull. It's unacceptable that people were breaking into that home in the first place. It's unacceptable that a woman can be in her own home and be sexually assaulted and that those events have happened. And for all of us that live in Alice Springs, we feel great distress for that. And I think all of us are thinking about those two cases and feeling it in our guts. We feel it in our guts.

DANIEL:

Can you just tell me what it feels like on the streets and in the homes of people there at the moment?

CATHERINE:

Look there's no doubt that when you go to bed at night, you know, you check your doors a little closer. When you read the papers, when you get on to your social media, you're sort of bracing to see what might come next. And when we think about how close we are to all of those events, you know, one of them happened two doors down from my daughter. And I know that in recent weeks, you know, she's been broken into twice. So this is really close to home for everyone who lives in Alice Springs. We all know someone who has been a victim of crime. But I think a lot of us also know that the current approaches aren't working. They're not working.

DANIEL:

And it was crime in the territory, particularly in Alice Springs, that the new NT CLP government campaigned around fixing and they won in a landslide in August. So what have they done since then to address it?

CATHERINE:

Look, I think what we've heard is that… it's even hard to talk about, to be perfectly honest. What we've heard is that things like spit hoods are now back in legislation and spit hoods are used as instruments of torture.

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 4:

“A controversial restraint banned in NT youth prisons since a landmark Royal Commission that could come back into use if the Country Liberal Party wins the next election.”

CATHERINE:

We have to be really honest about this. Our communities voted for this to happen. Our communities voted that children as young as ten in juvenile detention can be restrained and have spit hoods applied. When those hoods are applied, we know that something is going really, really wrong with the behaviours of a child in a detention centre. We also know that when children behave like that in a detention setting, it's because they have no access to their parents or the people that love them. The chances are that they haven't had access to the supports and tools that they might need. So we know in the Northern Territory, for example, the majority of children in the detention centre have significant learning disabilities that were never identified and never responded to and therefore the supports that they need aren't there. And what you get is an extraordinary outburst of behaviours which are really symptomatic of someone who is traumatised. The other thing we've seen, of course, because I mentioned the age of ten, was the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility.

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 5:

“The Country Liberal Party has promised to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to 10 and to force drunks into mandatory alcohol rehabilitation.”

CATHERINE:

Now increasing the age to 14 was actually a recommendation of the Royal Commission into Child Detention in the Northern Territory. It said raise the age, get rid of the spit hoods. So what we've seen is that age of criminal responsibility going down again.

The other thing that we've heard that communities are incredibly distressed about is in increasing the number of children that will be put into juvenile detention settings, those children, particularly from Central Australia, will be moved up to the top end, so that's thousands of kilometres away from their families. So it means they will have no contact with their families while they are going through extraordinary hardship. And when I talk about these things, I've got to be clear we're not saying that there shouldn't be punishment for criminal behaviour. No one's saying that. Our first response has to be the law and order response. There's no way around that. But the second thing is, we can't keep doing what we've been doing and what we're looking at has not happened overnight. It hasn't happened in the last election cycle. It didn't happen in the election cycle before that. It has been happening to us for decades and decades and decades. We keep coming up with the same responses and expecting a different outcome.

DANIEL:

Coming up after the break, why young people offend and what can be done that will actually make a difference.

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DANIEL:

Catherine, the police commissioner, Michael Murphy, has said that the nature of offending is changing in Alice Springs. Why do you think we’re seeing the level of violent crime at this point seemingly rise on the streets of Alice Springs?

CATHERINE:

We keep treating crime with the same response. Increasing criminalisation increases crime. The younger you have contact with the criminal justice system, as opposed to a diversion system, the more likely it is you are to be a repeat offender, the more likely you are that those offences will increase in severity and the more likely you are to have ongoing contact with the justice system for the rest of your life and all those really terrible life outcomes that are associated with that. You can read any criminal expert in the world, they will tell you that. When children or young people or adults even, in return to the same environment and you haven't worked on what was causing it, then you can expect a return in that behaviour. And again, if you look at the event that resulted in the harm of a baby and that involved two young people, I'd put money on that at least one of them, if not both of them, have had significant contact with the child protection system. And when we see these things, the immediate response is to punish parents, punish families. When again, if you start unpacking what those system failures are, the chances are that right at the beginning there was poverty. The other thing that I hear from mob on the ground is that people have been going to look for help and saying, look, we're worried about this particular person. And they say they do things like report it to the police. Police respond to crime, they don't respond to a report that someone's walking around. That's not their job. They respond to crime. What we know, again, is nationally and internationally, the evidence shows if you have a diversionary response to this, in actual fact, rather than punishing a crime that's already happened, the criminal behaviour or offending behaviours disappears, in about 75 - some places will talk about 85% success rates. So in actual fact, when you're talking about reducing crime, that is the model of practice that has the most impact.

DANIEL:

Can you tell me more about that? Like, what would a diversionary program look like and what sort of diversionary programs are effective in that part of the world?

CATHERINE:

If you're truly doing diversion right, it means that every child has their own plan. So you've picked up that maybe there's a child at risk and you now have to work out, well, what's going on in this child's life? And again, poverty's going to be there almost without fail. Poverty is going to be there. Does this child have somewhere to sleep? Has this child, does this child need some developmental screening? How do we ensure that we are giving that child the support they need to handle external stimuli?

I heard a story the other day, actually, it's quite an extraordinary story and it's a bit of work done by the NPY Women's Council in Alice Springs, and they've gone out to Imana Community and they've said to the children out there because, you know, there's a lot of people that have a lot of things to say about our children in central Australia, but not a lot of room for their voices to be heard. And they asked them if you could have superheroes, what would they look like? And the first thing they said was Merne, which means food. So the first superhero these children identified was food. The second superhero was Inma. So what is Inma? Inma means dance, song. And they said, well, why do you need Inma? Because Inma makes us feel happy and strong. And again, if you apply what Inma and song mean in a therapeutic model, they are actually tools of healing which makes sense. The third thing they identified was love. We need the love of our families. We feel safe when we're in our families. And the fourth one was Jocopa. So that's a law. That's law that tells you how to behave, how you might want to understand your environment, what you do in an environment when you feel fearful, where you go to for support.

And then they said to them, listen, you mob have heard about the other superheroes, haven't you? Like Superman and Spiderman and, woah, yeah, we know them mob. And they said, would you like a superhero like that? And so they started thinking about that as a superhero. And one of the superheroes they came up with in that frame was Regina. She's a comic girl, and that particular superhero has the powers to throw her net into Alice Springs to catch the naughty kids. And again, this is the language of children to catch the naughty kids in that net and then very quickly bring them back home to the families that love them, where those other superheroes that they identified can care for them. In that example, those children in the middle of the bush, who probably have English as a fourth or fifth language, identified a hierarchy of needs. The other way that the hierarchy of needs is described is, you can see it in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, those children understood inherently what they needed to be successful in life and the tools that were required in order to respond to the world around them. Those are sorts of things that when we're talking about a juvenile diversion tactic we need to be addressing and we need to be putting that child's voice front and centre in that so we actually understand what's going on.

DANIEL:

So Catherine, Northern Territorians know better than anyone else that the Federal Government can have a role to play in that part of the world. What role should the Federal Government be playing in this response, if anything at all?

CATHERINE:

The truth of it is that what we're looking at in Alice Springs is a system failure from all levels of government, and there are three levels of government at play in the Northern Territory. So the Federal Government, they hold the big levers. That's where the bulk of the money comes from. So the Federal Government really does need to look at the need in the Northern Territory. A lot of the work I work on relates to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, and one of the fundamental calls in that is about shared decision making, talking to your community, about what it is they might actually need, you know, what is actually missing in your community. There's no point in coming up with a program that was developed in Sydney and applying it in the bush.

It's making sure that if places like the Northern Territory are getting the funding that they need, needs based funding for things like domestic violence. That is an extraordinary driver of offending behaviours because it drives children out of the home. They don't feel safe in their home. It means looking at being innovative and actually saying what we are doing is failing, let's listen more to community voices and genuinely investing in community design to say, right now, what is it that you need? What is it that's happening and how do we stop this happening?

DANIEL:

Catherine, thank you so much for your time.

CATHERINE:

Thank you.

DANIEL:

A few months ago I traveled to Alice Springs to take an in-depth look at the crisis there. What I found was that youth crime is a symptom of a series of interventions big and small into the lives of Aboriginal people.

To hear my three part report, search This is Alice Springs wherever you listen to podcasts.

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DANIEL:

Also in the news today...

A crackdown on protester rights and a plan to bolster social cohesion will be part of the Victorian government’s response to the suspected terror attack on the Adass Israel synagogue.

In a press conference, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan said she has had enough of protests that have caused disruption in the state and may legislate to outlaw protest in the vicinity of places of worship.

NSW is planning similar changes, following a rally outside the great synagogue earlier this month.

And,

North Korean troops sent to support Russia in their war against Ukraine have been killed during combat.

North Korea has sent more than 10,000 troops to the region, with about 30 now killed in the battle in Russia’s Krsk border region, according to Ukraine’s military intelligence agency.

I’m Daniel James, this is 7am. We’ll be back with you tomorrow with an on-the-ground report from Damascus, in Syria.

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