The two most powerful Aboriginal voices in the country are now women from Alice Springs. The question is whether anyone will listen to them, writes Sky News Northern Australia Correspondent Matt Cunningham.
Whatever your position on the Voice, this argument is hard to follow. It’s a statement contradicted by events in the eight months before the trouble in the Outback town attracted such prominence that the Prime Minister was forced to visit.
Two weeks after the bans were lifted, newly elected federal politicians Marion Scrymgour and Jacinta Price stood in our Federal Parliament in Canberra and voiced their alarm that the bans had been dropped overnight with no plans in place to manage the return of alcohol. “I’m not saying that the town camp alcohol measures should have continued, but I am saying that before they were allowed to lapse, harm minimisation should have been properly addressed.”
Given the alarm bells that were being rung by Aboriginal women from both sides of politics, you might have imagined there would be urgent change. This week a doctor from the Alice Springs Hospital told me they had treated a woman whose husband had tried to decapitate her before slitting his own throat. In another case an eight-year-old girl had been forced to wave down an ambulance to get help for her baby sister because their mother was too drunk.
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