The task is complicated by a paradox. As well as having a great gift for friendship Robert was in many ways a very private person. So I’ll leave it mainly to the extract below — from a short family history he was working on — to give a sense of the forces that created a gifted reporter who published thousands of carefully crafted pieces over a more than fifty-year career.

Robert spent his childhood in Wingham, a NSW town on the Manning River, where his parents ran a residential hotel. Those years left him with warm memories of the character and pace of postwar country life, tempered by a growing sense that change was inevitable. More importantly, life at the Wingham Hotel — a microcosm of rural Australia — fuelled in him an intense curiosity. Journalism seems always to have been the logical end point of those early influences.

After studying politics at the University of New South Wales he took up a cadetship with the Sydney Morning Herald, where his reporting skills were soon apparent. He became known to readers outside Sydney after he moved to another Fairfax paper, the National Times, to write and edit features.

He was also contributing Australian news to the Guardian in London, and it was probably those pieces that attracted the attention of the Independent, the exciting new paper launched by a trio of journalists in London in 1986. One of his first assignments as the paper’s Australian correspondent was the legally delicate job of covering the Spycatcher trial. Reporting on this attempt by the British government to suppress the Australian publication of a controversial MI5 memoir was complicated by a ruling by the Law Lords back in London, who had declared any mention of the book’s contents off limits for the British media.

After more than a decade with the Independent Robert was appointed Australian correspondent for the Economist, to which he continued contributing — regularly then occasionally — until quite recently. Throughout those years he also contributed to Australian magazines including Australian Society, Anne Summers Reports, the Good Weekend and, from 2009, Inside Story. For a time he wrote editorials for the Sydney Morning Herald.

Somehow during these years he found time to write a history of British nuclear testing in Australia, a book about rural Australia’s social and economic upheaval and a biography (extracted here) of the pioneering rock journalist Lillian Roxon.

Among his articles for Australian Society were two on the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. That interest in Indigenous affairs carried over into two outstanding pieces for Inside Story based on visits to Bourke and Moree to see innovative justice projects in action. Among his other features for Inside Story was a profile of the maverick western Sydney Liberal Craig Laundy, an account of the migration-led revival of Dubbo, and a report on the unveiling of a new statue, also in Dubbo, of Aboriginal rights leader William Ferguson.

He was a fierce critic of Australia’s treatment of refugees and an equally fierce advocate of an Australian republic. He wrote meticulously but responded amiably to editorial meddling. His circle of friends and acquaintances was wide, and he was invariably a welcoming presence during my visits to Sydney. I am among the many who will miss him enormously.

Here, then, is a short extract from Robert’s last writing project…

On Friday 20 September 1946 the Wingham Chronicle carried a small item near the top of its “Personal” column: “Mr and Mrs Dave Milliken, of the Wingham Hotel, are being congratulated on the birth last weekend of a son and heir.”

The son and heir was me. My sister and only sibling, Sue, had been born six and a half years earlier, but no one ever called her a daughter and heiress. My birth came in the first year of the baby boomers, the post–second world war generation whose arrival presaged big social change. But old attitudes on women’s role in society, and much else, still died hard.

Heir to what? My grandfathers, Harry Cross and James Milliken, had separately built enterprises of the kind around which life on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, and in many other rural regions, revolved: a country hotel and a dairy farm. The worlds these tow institutions encompassed had barely changed in at least fifty years. But they were about to do so, not least for their baby-boom grandchildren.

It was probably 1950 when the first of us boomers became aware of the world around us. Shorn of the privations of economic depression and war, we were defined by youth and renewal: the opening up of education, the postwar rebuilding, the arrival of different sorts of people from the mono-Anglo immigrants of our parents’ generation, and a new popular culture captured largely by the biggest glamour figures of all time, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. All this spelled confidence. How could we not be different?

I’ve long wanted to write about my childhood in an Australia that has largely passed, where people in New South Wales, at least, lived according to simpler patterns and precepts. Political trends and social mores seemed set in stone; few, if any, questioned them. There were no movements to advance the interests of women, immigrants, First Australians, gay people and others outside society’s masculine conformity because they barely seemed to exist.

Inevitably, my two grandfathers — whose businesses defined much about the rural Australia I entered — provided the stepping-off points. The first baby boomers were born during a crucial transition, from the tail end of the era of European expansion to the opening up of new cultural frontiers.

The Wingham Hotel, also known as Cross’s Hotel, stood confidently and invitingly at the entrance to Wingham, a town of perhaps 3000 people on the Manning River, about 320 kilometres north of Sydney. The Milliken farm, “Magheramorne,” faced the Wallamba River at Darawank, a hamlet near the Pacific Ocean about thirty-six kilometres southeast of Wingham.

Before the days of motels and licensed clubs, country hotels like ours played key roles in country life. They were the places where people stayed, ate, met, did business and, at the Wingham Hotel at least, lived. The residents weren’t people just looking for somewhere cheap to doss. They were what today would be called young professionals, for whom the hotel offered comfort and security.

In my first few years, residents included a pharmacist, a doctor, an ex–prisoner of war from Changi, and the venerable Miss Paterson, who became Wingham’s first female health inspector in 1949. They were the “permanents” who, in some ways, became part of the family.

Yet social mores kept familiarity at a distance. We called them Mr, Mrs or Miss, never by their first names (the honorific Ms hadn’t been coined). When I met her again fifty years later in her retirement in a mid-north coast beach town, Miss Paterson gave a sense of how these rigidities were starting to break down when she landed in Wingham after the war.

“There was a first-name basis largely, and I didn’t think that was right,” she told me. “You weren’t going to have a disciplined staff if they were going to call you Bill and Joe and whatever. So I was trying to educate them, but I don’t think I had any success at all. In the office itself, the girls all called one another by their first names, but maybe I just looked difficult. The town clerk always called me Miss Paterson. Some of the labourers would come in and say, “Is Jim in?” meaning the town clerk. I’d give them a lecture, and say Mr-whoever-was-the-town-clerk was in.”

Social life was more relaxed, with people expressing their feelings in sayings that have largely fallen out of use. Instead of swearing, publicly at least, they said “Strike a light,” “Spare me days,” “God strewth” or just “Strewth” to convey shock or exasperation, and “God give me strength” for outright disapproval.

I didn’t inherit either the hotel or the dairy farm, but each of them has remained embedded in my imagination. That’s because the hotel in particular, but even the farm, were such vibrant places where people, not machines, computers and algorithms, were the drivers of daily life.

By the time I was born, both grandfathers were dead. My parents, Thelma (known as Thel), Harry Cross’s elder daughter, and David (known as Dave), James Milliken’s youngest son, had married in 1939 and, the following year, taken over the Wingham Hotel in partnership with Thel’s younger sister, Jennie. We lived as a family in a sprawling flat upstairs, and while Thel, Dave and Jennie were running the business downstairs Sue and I were endlessly fascinated by the colourful cast of characters — staff, patrons, diners, drinkers, travelling salesmen and visitors of all kinds — who thronged the hotel’s kitchen, dining room, bars and lounges.

In some ways, it was like living in a frontier town of the kind depicted in the Westerns that featured in Wingham’s two cinemas (then known as picture theatres) in the 1940s and 50s. One artist’s depiction of the approach to Wingham — looking across the Cedar Party Creek bridge and up the rise of Wynter Street to the Wingham Hotel — evokes the town entrance of my childhood, unchanged as it must have been for decades. I imagine coaches bringing people along the dirt road and bullock trains taking freshly sawn native cedar and eucalyptus logs from forests in the hills around Wingham, down Isabella Street to the wharf, where they were shipped to Sydney and the wider world.

Wingham’s own world was a self-sufficient one. There were no supermarkets, no clothing or hardware chain stores owned by distant conglomerates. Local families — the Moxeys, the Gleesons, the Maitlands, the Mellicks and others — owned and ran the local businesses that provided food, groceries, clothes, farm equipment and almost every provision townsfolk needed.

This self-sufficiency helped to give Wingham and its district’s tight-knit population a strong sense of identity. So did the local economy, which revolved around dairy and beef farming and timber. It belonged to a world in which most of Australia’s exports came from the bush. That, too, was about to change, as hardships from the past faded away and the new golden age, born with the baby boomers, began.

Thel, Dave, Jennie and their generation had lived through two of the worst events of the twentieth century: the Depression of the 1930s and the second world war. The war had come to the Wingham Hotel in various ways. Family friends went, or were sent, to live there, seeking sanctuary from isolation and attack. And Dave fought battles of a different sort with government authorities over the rationing of beer.

Although the war had ended just a year before I was born, through my childhood eyes it was as if it had never happened. A new world of abundance and prosperity was unfolding.

A fortnight after I was born Ben Chifley won the 1946 election for the Labor Party, claiming Australia was “about to enter upon the greatest era in her history.” The start of the baby boom fuelled demand for housing and consumer goods, and a big rise in immigration helped to underpin postwar economic expansion. As the historian Stuart Macintyre observed, “The third quarter of the twentieth century was an era of growth unmatched since the second half of the nineteenth century.”

Along with growth and prosperity, three events in 1949, three years after I was born, roughly defined the world I was entering. Mao Zedong led the Chinese Communist Party to power, founding the People’s Republic of China. The Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic weapon, ending America’s monopoly as a nuclear power. Those two events consolidated the cold war: a strategic rivalry between the West and the Soviet Union and its allies, including the fear of nuclear war, that was a fundamental feature of the 1950s.

The third significant event of 1949 that helped fix Australia’s political world happened closer to home. Bob Menzies, founder of the Liberal Party, won the 1949 federal election, and remained Australia’s prime minister for a record seventeen years. Menzies was a consummate politician for whom the economic boom at home and the cold war’s uncertainties abroad facilitated a hold on power. The government’s anti-communist rhetoric pervaded the 1950s, with Menzies warning of Australia falling victim to a “thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.”

There was little sense of a new form of postwar Australian nationalism emerging. Another twenty years had to pass for that to happen. Menzies, the ultimate Anglophile and monarchist, folded Australia’s identity into its British colonial heritage just as that world was growing rapidly out of date. In a speech to the US House of Representatives in 1950, he declared: “The world needs the United States of America. The world needs the British peoples of the world.” He made no mention of his own land as a separate sovereign entity.

As a child at Wingham public school, opposite our family’s hotel, I attended Empire Day, a curious annual celebration of the British Empire, with bonfires and fireworks, that ceased only in 1958. The Biripi Aboriginal community, who’d lived in the Manning Valley for tens of thousands of years before the Crosses, Millikens and other settlers arrived, were not included. The empire had robbed them of their lands and much of their cultural heritage. They were not seen, and nor did the school mention their names or story. As a child, I didn’t know they existed; to my knowledge, I never saw an Aboriginal person in Wingham.

In the first years of the baby boomers, Aboriginal Australians were kept in their colonial-era places, the missions and settlements, usually in squalor. Purfleet, near the Manning town of Taree, and a settlement in Forster, at the mouth of the Wallamba River, offered my first childhood glimpses of Aboriginal people, but only as we drove past, and with no discussion of who they were or how they got there. Righting injustices was not part of Australia’s immediate postwar agenda.

Too much else was happening to redefine postwar Australia as a land of wealth, confidence and leisure. The first Sydney–Hobart yacht race was held in 1945. Australia started making cars in 1948. Construction of the most ambitious public enterprise — the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme — started in 1949. Many of the workers who built that project, who comprised the first wave of immigrants drawn from European countries other than Britain, were trailblazers of the multicultural profile that eventually changed the country’s human face.

The changes didn’t stop at home. Overseas, Australia was joining the American Century. To replace our old dependence on Britain, we looked across the Pacific to form security alliances with our new “great and powerful friend,” as Menzies called the United States, which had led us to victory in the Pacific war. America’s cultural influence reached a zenith during the 1950s, when the first wave of baby boomers came into childhood. The surge of popular culture from America included the birth of rock-and-roll, resonating among a new generation in an Australia that had given barely any encouragement to local voices in film, drama or music.

All this gave a young baby boomer the sense of an exciting and prosperous, yet secure world. Menzies’s reassuring tones on the radio and in newsreels (television didn’t come to Australia until 1956) helped see to that. The rhythm of life in the sheltered worlds of the Wingham Hotel and the Magheramorne farm, and elsewhere, hardly varied from one year to the next.

And yet it was about to change. In the mid 1950s, Thel and Dave sold the Wingham Hotel, bringing to an end a family ownership of three generations. We moved to Glory Vale, a beautiful farm near Gloucester, also on the Manning River. I rode a horse every day to a one-room bush school. In this unlikely place, we had a brush with Hollywood glamour when the star Anne Baxter settled incongruously for a time further along the Manning. A way of life for rural Australians would soon pass forever. •

The post Boomer time appeared first on Inside Story.

Howard introduced his “border protection” regime on 29 August 2001, after the Norwegian freight ship Tampa had rescued 433 Afghan asylum seekers from a sinking vessel in the Indian Ocean. Arne Rinnan, the Tampa’s captain, asked to land them on Australian territory. With an election pending, and his Coalition government trailing Labor in opinion polls, Howard ordered forty-five Australian SAS soldiers to board the Tampa and thwart Rinnan’s bid.

Within days, the government had struck deals with Nauru and PNG to host Australian detention camps. The hapless Tampa refugees became their first inmates, and later boatloads entering Australian waters were sent there too. Howard called his action the Pacific Solution.

Labor closed the offshore camps in 2008 after Kevin Rudd defeated Howard, only to open them again four years later. For both sides, the political justification was that this harsh regime would deter more “boat people” from risking the journey. But Madeline Gleeson, of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of NSW, says, “We’ve been mired in this policy for so long for purely political reasons.”

Indeed, to many Australians its sheer longevity suggests that offshore detention has always been this country’s way of dealing with asylum seekers. But the policy is facing its own crisis, and apparently crumbling from within, with no sign of a fresh, more humane and less expensive approach from either main political party.

In late June I travelled to Albion Park, south of Sydney, for a different milestone — one that offered an insight into how Australia once reacted to boat arrivals.

About 250 people had gathered at the HARS Aviation Museum to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Australian navy’s rescue of ninety-nine Vietnamese asylum seekers on 21 June 1981. Known as the “MG99” (for “Melbourne Group”), they were among millions of people who fled Vietnam and neighbouring countries after the end of the Vietnam war in 1975. Some started arriving on Australia’s shores in 1976, with more over following years, giving Australia its first experience of dealing with boat-borne refugees. Another Liberal, Malcolm Fraser, was prime minister at the time.

The contrast with Howard’s approach could not have been more striking. Claire Higgins of the Kaldor Centre explains it: “The immigration department considered several ideas, but the Fraser government rejected the options of turning back boats and potentially indefinite immigration detention, because they would be inhumane, damaging to Australia’s international reputation and would not provide a lasting solution for people forced to flee.” Higgins says Fraser government decision-makers recognised that such options were “harsh and ill-conceived from the start.”

Australia also worked with the UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, in a bid to find a genuine regional approach, and with other resettlement countries such as the United States and Canada. Australia admitted over 65,000 refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia over seven years to 1982, many from regional refugee camps.

“There was a sense that Australia and America had a moral duty to do something because we’d been involved in the Vietnam war,” says Madeline Gleeson. “We also had political leadership then of a kind that we haven’t had for a long time.” Fraser had his opponents within the governing Coalition, but his policy prevailed.

On military exercises in the South China Sea in June 1981, the Royal Australian Navy aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne rescued the MG99 refugees after a Tracker surveillance aircraft spotted their leaking boat. All ninety-nine, including nineteen children, were hauled safely up the side of the vessel at night. The ship landed the refugees in Singapore, where UN and Australian officials processed them in a refugee camp. The Melbourne asked the Fraser government to resettle seventy-seven. They arrived on a Qantas flight in Australia a month after their rescue.

At the Albion Park anniversary, former navy people involved in the rescue, and some of those they saved, made speeches. The Tracker aircraft that found them rested near the stage as a museum exhibit. The late Mike Hudson, then commander of the Melbourne, was recalled as saying, “The MG99 rescue was the highlight of my career.” The contrast with John Howard’s use of military commandos on the Tampa twenty years later was sharp.

Stephen Nguyen, aged twenty when he was rescued, later told me how his life unfolded in Australia. “It wasn’t easy at first with barriers of language, loneliness and no relatives,” he said. “For my generation it was very hard.” He taught himself English, worked in factories and started a food shop business in western Sydney so he could support younger siblings who followed him to Australia.

Two of those siblings became doctors, another an electronic technician. Another brother later worked for the State Library of NSW. Nguyen now has four children, three of them at university.

The first boat arrivals from Vietnam and neighbouring countries were assessed for refugee status in Australia. Then, under an international agreement struck to handle the continuing flow, the UN refugee agency assessed them in camps in Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines for resettlement in the West — avoiding their need to risk perilous journeys by boat that later claimed many lives.

I asked Nguyen his view of Australia’s offshore policy, under which people have been detained indefinitely. He paused. “You can’t treat them as prisoners, as abandoned people,” he said. “To me the offshore policy is a horrible policy. You have to treat people like humans, and to make the screening process faster in a humanitarian way. The Tampa story has tarnished Australia.”

Where does the Tampa policy stand after twenty years? Government figures show Australia sent 1637 asylum seekers to Manus Island and Nauru in the seven years between when Howard opened the camps in 2001 and when Kevin Rudd’s Labor government closed them. Despite Howard’s claim that the Tampa drama was about keeping “boat people” out, most were resettled in Australia and New Zealand.

Another 4180 people have been sent to the offshore camps since Julia Gillard’s government reopened them in late 2012, making a total of almost 6000 people detained in both places. When Rudd usurped Gillard briefly as prime minister before the 2013 election, he sought to out-tough the Coalition by declaring that no island detainees would ever settle in Australia. And when Tony Abbott won the election, he out-toughed Rudd, reverting to Howard’s militarisation of asylum policy by creating Operation Sovereign Borders and using the navy to turn back boats.

Australia hasn’t sent detainees to the islands since 2014 — mainly, it seems, because boats have been turned back and some asylum seekers have been deported to their countries of origin. Many others have been quietly transferred to Australia for medical help and to remove children from Nauru. They’ve been left in detention centres here or on six-month bridging visas in the community, with no indication of where they’ll end up, or when. A Senate committee was told in March that this group could number more than 1200. Another 137 asylum seekers are still in PNG and 123 in Nauru. Onshore or offshore, the government sticks to its line that they will never settle in Australia.

But if island detainee numbers have fallen, the policy’s financial cost has only soared. Governments have kept secret the precise burden on Australian taxpayers, but parliamentary and think tank researchers have assembled credible figures from budget papers and other sources. They paint a staggering picture.

Madeline Gleeson told Britain’s House of Commons home affairs committee late last year that offshore processing at a “conservative estimate” costs Australia roughly $1 billion a year. Building camps in such remote places, outsourcing their management (often without adequate cost controls) to private companies, and funding charter flights and healthcare are just some of the costs. Australia also pays Nauru visa fees of $2000 per refugee per month, bringing total visa costs to $26 million in 2016–17 alone.

Gleeson says offshore processing’s real cost “consistently exceeds” government projections. In 2017–18, it cost Australia $1.5 billion, more than twice the estimate of a year earlier. Even with smaller offshore numbers, the government forecast spending $1.2 billion on offshore processing in 2020–21.

The government’s undisclosed legal fees, defending challenges to its treatment of asylum seekers, would inflate the bill even more. Last March the Australian Lawyers Alliance sent a freedom of information request for claims lodged by and compensation paid to asylum seekers for wrongful detention and personal injury in Australia, PNG and Nauru over the decade to 2021. It asked for similar information on personal injury applications by detention centre staff. The home affairs department claimed it had no relevant documents in its possession.

Drawing on costings by the consultancy firm Equity Economics, a 2019 report by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Save the Children and GetUp! estimated that offshore detention and processing had cost $9 billion between 2016 and 2020. It built on an earlier report by Save the Children and UNICEF that estimated offshore processing and boat turnback costs of $9.6 billion between 2013 and 2016.

Even allowing for the onshore detention component of these figures, they suggest that the offshore policy cost taxpayers the best part of $19 billion from 2013 to 2020. Assuming Gleeson’s conservative estimate of $1 billion a year also applied to the Pacific Solution from 2001 to 2008, the offshore policy appears to have cost Australians about $26 billion, in both its versions, since 2001.

The psychological cost for detainees kept offshore for years is bad enough. But could Australia have also saved money with a different approach?

The 2019 report argues it could. It calculates that keeping asylum seekers offshore costs $573,000 per detainee per year. If asylum seekers were dealt with more speedily in Australia instead, the costs would fall sharply: to $346,000 per detainee in onshore mandatory detention per year, and to $10,221 a year for each detainee living in the community on a bridging visa. The report calls the cost of keeping people offshore since the Pacific Solution restarted in 2013 “enormous both economically and morally.”

Apart from the 1200 or so people the government has transferred to Australia from Manus and Nauru, about 30,000 asylum seekers who arrived by boat during the last years of the former Labor government are still living in Australia. Coalition governments have called them the “legacy caseload,” banning them from lodging visa applications for up to four years and receiving legal aid. They can’t apply for permanent residency, just for three- or five-year temporary visas. The UN Refugee Agency brands these as “punitive measures” imposed “largely for political reasons.” Australia, it says, could be violating its obligations under the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees.

Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of the immigration department, argues that these people are unlikely to be deported. “I think the present government’s policy is just to ignore them,” he says. “That’s bad policy. Australia had always had a just policy that if you were in Australia you’re either on a pathway to permanent residency or to be sent back if you’re not eligible as a refugee. Ignoring them is more American policy.”

Then there’s what Rizvi calls a “fifth wave” of asylum seekers who started arriving about six years ago. These people aren’t brought by people smugglers; they arrive by air on visitor visas. Typically from Malaysia and China, they then apply for asylum through agents here and overseas who’ve arranged their trips; this gives them work rights, usually on farms, while they wait. Rizvi estimates about 27,000 such people whose asylum applications have been refused are still in Australia, and growing at about 500 a month. He says the applicants are being exploited by employers and agents, and some have probably been injured, or even died, but their plight is rarely reported. Rizvi calls this wave a “scam” and “the biggest asylum seeker wave we’ve ever had.”

Taken together, the “legacy caseload,” the “fifth wave,” the transfer to Australia of detainees from the islands, and the release of asylum seekers who were brought to Australia for medical treatment under the repealed medevac law sends a message about a government that once boasted credentials of “strong border protection” and never allowing “unauthorised” arrivals in.

Rizvi’s conclusion is damning. “I’d say our borders have never been more permeable and never managed so badly than under Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton [the former home affairs and now defence minister],” he says. “The borders are being used by scam organisers of the fifth wave. And the medevac releases show the government has given up. It knows these people aren’t going to leave.”

Labor under Paul Keating’s government pioneered detention centres onshore. But Rizvi speculates the offshore policy that Howard started with Tampa would not have happened under other postwar leaders, including Robert Menzies, the Liberal Party’s founder: “If this question had been put to Menzies he’d have found a different pathway to residency for those who’re eligible. He was much more conscious of social cohesion, as were Bob Hawke, Malcolm Fraser and Paul Keating.”

One political notion has largely driven Australia’s offshore policy: refuse people on boats entry to Australia. The problem with such a narrow approach is that it eventually leaves governments stranded. As Madeline Gleeson of the Kaldor Centre points out, it has no “exit strategy”: what to do with people once they’ve been found to be refugees.

At times, governments have desperately tried to find a way of dealing with these people caught in limbo. The Abbott and Turnbull governments struck deals with Cambodia and the United States respectively to take refugees from offshore camps. Just seven in Nauru agreed to resettle in Cambodia, at a reported cost to Australia of $55 million; four later returned voluntarily to their countries of origin rather than stay there. A Senate committee was told in March that 890 refugees have been resettled in America. That country, not Australia, now benefits from the initiatives that newly settled refugees like the MG99 group usually bring to immigrant countries.

Since the Taliban’s taking power in Afghanistan, the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany and others have signalled plans to take in thousands of Afghan refugees. So far, the Morrison government seems to be sticking to its line that Afghans on temporary visas in Australia should stay that way. Marise Payne, the foreign affairs minister, says they won’t be asked to return to Afghanistan “at this stage.” Such an approach is mired in the past. The crisis is bound to trigger more boat refugees from Afghanistan, and it should challenge the government to emulate the Fraser government’s response to another humiliating military finale, in Vietnam.

Gleeson thinks that the offshore detention policy is winding down by default. “It’s been winding down slowly since 2014, the last time new boat arrivals were sent offshore,” she says. “It’s an admission by the government that it’s not a long-term policy, and that it’s never going to work. It was meant to deter people from arriving by boat, but it didn’t.” •

The post No way out? appeared first on Inside Story.

The project resonates with Moree’s history. Mention Moree to many, and one phrase crops up: the Freedom Ride. In 1965, inspired partly by civil rights campaigns in America, a busload of students from the University of Sydney spent a fortnight driving through northern New South Wales. The Student Action for Aborigines group included Charles Perkins, later a leading Aboriginal bureaucrat, and Jim Spigelman, later a chief justice of New South Wales.

The group set out to “publicise the appalling conditions under which our Aborigines live,” wrote journalist Fred Wells in the Canberra Times. The paper described those conditions as “shanty towns, where most blacks lived without sanitation, electricity and often water.”

Just seventeen years earlier, Australia had helped to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But the racial segregation the freedom riders found in far-flung towns was shocking. In Walgett, about 200 kilometres west of Moree, the RSL club banned Aboriginal patrons except on Anzac Day, including those who had fought two decades earlier in the second world war. Cinemas in Walgett, Bowraville and elsewhere treated Aboriginal people the way America’s Deep South treated black Americans, forcing them to enter by separate doors and to sit in separate seats from whites. When a sixteen-year-old Aboriginal girl tried to challenge the ban in Bowraville, the theatre’s owner reportedly declared that it had always been policy to segregate, “and he would continue to enforce it.”

In 1955, a decade before the Freedom Ride hit Moree, the local council had passed an ordinance banning Aboriginal children from the town’s swimming pool. Amid a stand-off with police and hundreds of angry white townsfolk, Charles Perkins took in a small group of Aboriginal kids, and joined them in the pool. The freedom riders faced anger on the road, too. After they left Walgett for Moree late one night, a truck overtook their bus and tried to force it off the road. Bill Packenham, their driver, later quit the tour because it had “become too dangerous.” Another driver flew in to replace him.

Nothing like the Freedom Ride had been attempted in Australia before. It became something of a turning point in exposing the scope of inequalities and racism in Australia. In an editorial, the Canberra Times called for change: “The people of Moree and Walgett are especially angry because they know in their hearts that what the students say is true. There is colour prejudice in these towns, and in practice a round and ready kind of apartheid is the rule.”

Some Kamilaroi people credit the Freedom Ride with helping to trigger the constitutional referendum two years later, in 1967, in which Australians voted overwhelmingly to transfer power over Aboriginal affairs from the states to the Commonwealth.

To many, though, old attitudes and hurdles remain. The growing support among Aboriginal people and many legal experts for an approach like justice reinvestment could help solve problems that governments have largely ignored since the days of the Freedom Ride.

My own drive from Walgett to Moree last month was more peaceful than back then. Three years earlier, in 2018, I had visited Bourke, about 440 kilometres west of Moree along the same outback highway. Bourke had embarked on what has become Australia’s most successful bid by its Aboriginal people to use a justice reinvestment approach.

The town once had the highest conviction rate for Aboriginal children and teenagers in New South Wales. The state government’s response was to build more prisons.

Alistair Ferguson, a prominent Aboriginal figure in the town, was inspired by a different idea from the Open Society Institute, a New York think tank: devote the money instead towards resolving underlying causes of crime, and try to keep people out of prisons. His community formed a partnership with Just Reinvest NSW, a Sydney-based body advocating this “justice reinvestment” approach as public policy.

Its logic has defied governments, but it has helped Bourke’s “Maranguka” exercise become something of a showcase. In late 2018, five years after it started, the accounting firm KPMG reported substantial falls in juvenile offences and domestic violence, and a sharp rise in year 12 student retention rates. The project, it estimated, had saved Bourke’s criminal justice system about $3 million a year.

About twenty other Aboriginal communities, keen to do similar work, had already approached Just Reinvest NSW. A small grant from the state’s justice department helped produce a Justice Reinvestment Toolkit to give communities a better idea of what it was about. But limited funds have confined work so far to just two communities, Mount Druitt, a sprawling suburb in western Sydney, and Moree.

Mount Druitt and its surrounds (rather than Redfern, as many think) is home to Sydney’s largest Aboriginal population, about 9000 people, making it a strong candidate to test how justice reinvestment could work in a big urban area. Julie Williams, an Aboriginal woman who grew up in Mount Druitt, joined Just Reinvest NSW last year. Poor relations with police and high fine rates for young black people are the biggest problems, she says. Working with Baabayn Aboriginal Corporation, a group of western Sydney Elders, she and grassroots colleagues in the Western Sydney Watch Committee have started meeting with police in a bid to “reset the relationship.”

Work in Moree is further advanced. Located on the Mehi River, the town is a big business centre for the Gwydir River valley. Drawn by the region’s rich black soil plains, white settlers started arriving in the 1830s and, for the most part, have never looked back. It’s been a different story for the Kamilaroi people, said to be the second-biggest Aboriginal nation in eastern Australia after the Wiradjuri.

Fifty-six years after the Freedom Ride, inequalities remain deplorable. According to the 2016 census, fewer than half of Moree’s Kamilaroi people aged between fifteen and nineteen were in schools, compared with over two-thirds of non-Kamilaroi teenagers; less than a fifth of Moree’s Kamilaroi adults had completed year 12, compared with over twice that proportion for non-Kamilaroi people; just a quarter of Kamilaroi households were buying or owned a home, compared with almost two-thirds of other residents; and fewer than half of Moree’s Kamilaroi households had internet connection, compared with almost three-quarters of non-Kamilaroi people.

After the 1965 Freedom Ride, Charles Perkins told the press its “most important” aspect had been the “surprising degree of active support from the local Aboriginal people themselves.” Communities had anticipated their arrival with “strong interest”: Aboriginal people near Nambucca Heads, on the NSW north coast, had stood lookout on a hill for two days, watching for the students to come.

These attitudes were harbingers of what justice reinvestment is trying to achieve now: Aboriginal people determining their own approaches to solving problems, free from the directives of governments in faraway capital cities.

For Just Reinvest NSW, Moree seemed a logical place to help the local community start pursuing such an approach in 2019. After the Freedom Ride, Kamilaroi people had helped to form bodies like the Aboriginal Legal Service. Yet problems like high crime rates and school suspensions among young people seemed intractable. In late 2019 the NSW ombudsman reported that over a third of Aboriginal students at one Moree primary school and over half of Aboriginal students at a secondary school received short suspensions in 2017, the second-highest rates in each case among fifteen state “Connected Communities Schools.”

Experts talk of a “school to prison pipeline,” suggesting that children having trouble at school are more likely to end up in the criminal justice system. The Australian Institute of Criminology calls it a “potential association between school experiences, including suspension, and later antisocial and violent behaviour resulting in incarceration.”

Similar problems plagued Bourke before justice reinvestment began to work. Moree faces the challenge of assembling a leadership group to pull together “a lot of moving parts,” as Alistair Ferguson also found in Bourke. And Moree’s overall population is about five times bigger than Bourke’s, making for a more complex task. So the Kamilaroi people are working out what they call a “Moree way” for justice reinvestment.

I arrived in time to hear how this is evolving. Among the several community leaders who had gathered for a meeting at the Dhiiyaan Aboriginal Centre in Moree’s main street were two local Kamilaroi women who now work for Just Reinvest NSW in Moree, Judy Duncan and Mekayla Cochrane. Duncan, “Moree born and bred,”  has worked in the area for almost forty years, “through education and government,” as she puts it, and has “done time in the criminal justice system.” Cochrane, her younger colleague, joined Just Reinvest NSW late last year. “As a way to provide a platform for Aboriginal people, it’s a no-brainer,” says Cochrane. Joining them at this meeting were Jenny Lovric and Nicole Mekler of Just Reinvest NSW in Sydney.

“We’re trying to work out what the ‘Moree way’ is,” says Just Reinvest NSW’s Judy Duncan. Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

The local participants have set up working groups to enable Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal figures, police, school officials and others to talk to each other more productively and come up with locally designed approaches to problems. Like their counterparts in Bourke, they’ve also started building data to help track the problems.

“School suspensions and other education issues are big underlying problems in Moree,” Judy Duncan tells me. “We’re trying to work out what the ‘Moree way’ is. It’ll be Moree looking out for Moree, not government looking out for Moree. A community leadership group is starting to emerge on this. I love my community. It’s time we got things right. If the Aboriginal community can get it right, the rest of the community will, too.”

Just Reinvest NSW and the Aboriginal Legal Service have initiated a project with the Moree police aimed at cutting the number of young people who wind up in prison simply for breaching bail; a similar project is planned in Mount Druitt. Too often, young people are arrested for breaching bail conditions that are too onerous or that they can’t meet. The police have agreed to take a fresh approach by notifying the Aboriginal Legal Service of bail conditions earlier than before, allowing it to request amendments in certain cases.

“So far, it’s working,” says Helen McWilliam, officer-in-charge of Moree police, who presides over a staff of about fifty. “The last thing we want to see is more kids in the juvenile justice system.” Roger Best, crime manager of the New England police district, which embraces Moree, says twelve-year-olds were among the most prolific juvenile offenders, and that reoffending had been common. “But you can’t arrest your way out of these problems,” he adds. “Instead, justice reinvestment is about spending the money to address causes, so you can avoid spending money elsewhere later.”

Opening dialogues with the town’s big players is showing positive signs here. But some people at the Dhiiyaan centre tell me of other things that seem stuck in the past. More than sixty state and federal government services are located in Moree, but Kamilaroi people complain of trouble accessing them. Many feel that racist attitudes persist in everyday town life.

The Moree pool, the town’s flashpoint during the Freedom Ride, remains contentious. Owned by the shire council and run by a separate board, it was added to the list of National Heritage Places in 2013. The citation notes that the baths were a “stark example of official segregation” in 1965.

Many Kamilaroi people believe the exclusion goes on, in the form of a $9 entry price per person, making it unaffordable to poorer families, especially women looking after grandchildren over hot summer months. A Guardian Australia survey of public swimming pool fees in 129 local government areas last year found the Moree pool to be one of the two most expensive in the state.

“In the sixties you were excluded if you were black,” Judy Duncan says. “Now you’re excluded unless you’re rich.” Some reckon the two forms of exclusion are connected. Lyall Munro tells me, “The attitude lingers from the local government by-law in the 1950s that allowed segregation in this town. Nothing has changed for equality and liberty in Moree. It’s as though the Freedom Ride never happened.”

There’s growing support among legal experts for justice reinvestment as a way of keeping people out of prison and saving the criminal justice system money. The Australian Human Rights Commission, the Australian Law Reform Commission and the Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee have all called on governments to promote the idea and to back it with funds. For the most part, governments have declined to do so.

Almost a decade after it started, Bourke’s Maranguka exercise recently received a federal grant awarded to community projects in far-flung places, although Bourke’s appears to have been the only grant for justice reinvestment. The funds were modest: $35 million shared among ten communities over five years.

The work in Moree and Mount Druitt relies almost entirely on the goodwill of private philanthropists. The backers comprise a diverse mix of family foundations, legal firms and finance firms. The Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation and the Bill and Patricia Ritchie Foundation are supporting work in both places. The Paul Ramsay Foundation is supporting Just Reinvest NSW and site-based work. The Charitable Foundation, a private fund chaired by Steve Killelea, is involved with Moree. Herbert Smith Freehills, a law firm, is funding the Bail Project in Moree and Mount Druitt. Other law firms help with pro bono work. IAG, an insurance company, is funding some work in Mount Druitt. The Dusseldorp Forum, another family foundation, and one of the first funders at Bourke, is still involved there.

Most philanthropists prefer to keep the amounts they’re giving confidential. At least two others have given in-kind support: Dell Computers, with help from the law firm King & Wood Mallesons, gave one hundred laptops to Moree so students could keep schoolwork going remotely when schools closed amid the pandemic.

After learning of the Bourke project three years ago, VivCourt Trading, a Sydney finance firm, met Sarah Hopkins, co-chair of Just Reinvest NSW, to learn more. “We were inspired,” says Rob Keldoulis, VivCourt’s founder. The firm now supports a community-led OzTag team for Aboriginal men in Mt Druitt and youth advocacy in relation to policing and the criminal justice system. It has also helped Just Reinvest NSW save on rent by extending the lease on premises in Potts Point, Sydney, that VivCourt was vacating. “They can create roots and it gives them certainty,” Keldoulis says. “If we can help scale justice reinvestment up this way, hopefully governments can get behind it.”

The Justice Reform Initiative, an advocacy group launched last year, is calling for similar reforms to the criminal justice system, but on a broader scale. Chaired by Robert Tickner, a former federal Aboriginal affairs minister, it argues that governments have long used imprisonment as a “default response to disadvantage.” In early May, the group launched their campaign in Tasmania where the state governor, Kate Warner, hosted a reception.

Tickner is impressed by work in Bourke, Moree and Mount Druitt: “The Aboriginal people have been forced to do the heavy lifting for criminal justice reform.” But, he says, the next crucial step is missing: government support.

To gauge local government support I visited the mayor of Moree Plains Shire Council, Katrina Humphries, at Fishabout, her seafood shop in East Moree. Humphries has a strong political pedigree: thirteen years as mayor, she is the daughter of the late Wal Murray, a former NSW National Party leader and deputy premier.

Fishabout seems to be Humphries’s unofficial office, making for more relaxed chats with visitors than a slightly intimidating council chamber. As I arrive, she’s finishing a meeting at a dining table with Craig Jenkins, director of the NSW government’s regional office for New England and the state’s northwest. Jenkins happens to be a Kamilaroi man who grew up in Moree, and is back in town to discuss two big projects.

“We want Australia to know how important it is for Aboriginal people to have a say about their own lives”: the Moree Local Aboriginal Land Council’s Lloyd Munro.

Moree will be the hub for one of six Special Activation Precincts the NSW government is planning across the state to encourage investment in regions. Some of these precincts, including Moree’s, also lie along the route of the proposed Inland Rail from Melbourne to Brisbane, one of Australia’s biggest infrastructure projects. Humphries expects the first freight train on this line to roll into Moree in 2024–25. The master plan for Moree’s precinct, launched in May, claims it will create jobs by supporting local industries in what it says is already the most productive grain region in Australia.

What are the prospects of its creating jobs for Kamilaroi people? “Enormous,” Humphries replies. Her council includes no Aboriginal members, but she says it aims for 20 per cent of its employees to be Aboriginal. I ask about disquiet that Moree pool’s high entry fee still makes many Kamilaroi people feel excluded. She explains that the shire’s three pools, including Moree’s, have combined “community service obligation” costs of about $700,000 a year. The $9 fee, she adds, is “not as expensive as a packet of cigarettes.”

Humphries doesn’t shy away from identifying Moree’s broader problems: petty crime; drugs, which she notes are not confined to the Aboriginal community; too few case workers for vulnerable young people; and too high rates of Aboriginal incarceration. Her response is straightforward. “I’m a capitalist,” she says. “I believe people need to work, earn their own money and be proud of that.”

It doesn’t sound like the sort of collegial approach that drives justice reinvestment, but Humphries supports that exercise nonetheless. She’s “very interested” by what’s happening in Bourke and says, “The way forward is that our Aboriginal community has to be run by Aboriginal people. We can’t keep doing things in a cycle that’s doomed.”

Craig Jenkins was unavailable for an interview, but people involved in Moree’s justice reinvestment project who met him in town say he seems “passionate” about the Aboriginal community’s benefiting from the Special Activation Precinct.

So far the signs look promising, according to Lloyd Munro, Lyall’s brother, who is vice-chairman of the Moree Local Aboriginal Land Council. The Munro family have played distinguished roles for at least two generations, fighting for Aboriginal rights in Moree and around Australia. Lloyd’s father, Lyall Munro Senior, received a state funeral in Moree last year to honour his work. As children, two of Lloyd’s brothers responded to the Freedom Ride. Lyall Munro Junior recalls joining a bus to town from the mission where they lived, “and the townspeople pelted us with stuff.”

Encouraged by Charles Perkins, Dan Munro was among the first Aboriginal children to get into the Moree pool. Noeline Briggs-Smith, a local Aboriginal researcher, has recorded Dan Munro’s account: “We were just nine-year-old kids and we were crying, we were upset, we didn’t know where we were going. But even when we got into the pool we were uncomfortable because we knew, as people, we weren’t supposed to be there. We were shamed, but the students took the shame away from us and let us know we were part of this world.”

Lloyd Munro wants justice reinvestment to be a further step in making Kamilaroi people “part of this world.” Through the Aboriginal lands council, he’s having regular talks with Inland Rail and Special Activation Precinct officials to make sure the Kamilaroi people are part of the story. About seven Kamilaroi people already work at a new village for Inland Rail workers built on Carmine Munro Avenue, a street named after his mother; it’s a small proportion of the 300-odd workers the village is designed to accommodate.

He agrees education is still a “key problem” for Kamilaroi teenagers. For this reason, he’s excited about a youth forum that Moree’s justice reinvestment participants are planning in November, followed by an education summit soon afterwards. “I don’t think Moree has ever had events like this. It will be a very significant chance to address underlying issues.”

Committees, boards and NGOs have long run young Aboriginal people’s lives, he says. Now “it’s time to get youth involved. They can come to these big gatherings. We want Australia to know how important it is for Aboriginal people to have a say about their own lives.” •

The publication of this article was supported by grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas and the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

The post Finding the Moree way appeared first on Inside Story.

After one of the most turbulent weeks of his political career, though, there is no sign of the embattled Kelly. A large picture of the four-term MP stares out from his office window against an image of the Australian flag in which the Union Jack seems the most striking symbol. Blinds to the street are drawn, and the office looks closed.

“One thing about the Liberals is they don’t have long memories,” says Ian Hancock, historian of the party’s NSW division, when I ask him later about the implications of the rumoured challenge to Kelly’s preselection. “But a long memory in the Liberal Party comes into play when things are going badly.”

For the seat of Hughes, that would be about now.

An outspoken climate change sceptic from the party’s right, Kelly has troubled Scott Morrison’s government even more over his social media campaign against its Covid-19 strategy. The drama came to a head on 3 February when Labor’s Tanya Plibersek confronted Kelly in a Parliament House corridor and accused him of spreading “crazy conspiracy theories.” As a bevy of cameras recorded their confrontation, Plibersek reminded Kelly that her mother lived in his electorate, and declared she didn’t want her exposed to people who refused to be vaccinated because of Kelly’s campaign. So compelling was the encounter that the BBC ran the footage on its main news page.

It was only then that Morrison carpeted Kelly and told him to toe the government’s line. But the dispute kept mounting. On 12 February, Facebook was reported to have removed one of Kelly’s posts in which he opposed children wearing face masks during the pandemic.

The row has raised speculation that Kelly could face serious competition for preselection before the next federal election, which could take place as early as the second half of this year. Just days earlier Kevin Andrews, another seasoned Liberal right-winger, had lost preselection for his safe seat of Menzies in Melbourne. With the Liberal Party more polarised than ever, and the government holding a lower house majority of just three seats, questions are being asked about the likelihood of even more preselection clashes.

Ian Hancock doesn’t rule them out. And he argues that safe Liberal seats could be at more risk of challengers than marginals, at least based on trends from recent years. He cites a version of advice attributed to Enoch Powell, a former British Conservative politician. “For God’s sake win a marginal seat,” Powell once said. No one will challenge you while it stays marginal, and “you can then put your stamp on it and make it a safe seat.”

Over the past eight years, independents have captured two seats long considered impregnably safe Liberal: Indi in Victoria and Warringah in Sydney. After Zali Steggall defeated former prime minister Tony Abbott in Warringah in 2019, she put her stamp on the seat by campaigning strongly for action on climate change on behalf of voters fed up with Abbott’s climate denialism.

“These are the sorts of seat the Liberals won’t lose to Labor but to an independent who’s got presence in the electorate,” says Hancock. “Warringah will now be hard for them to get back.” Simple arithmetic dictates that safe seats are more vulnerable because it’s often easier for an independent to get into second place before preferences are distributed.

Hancock sees two forces at play in Kevin Andrews’s preselection loss. Andrews had been the seat’s MP for thirty years, and some Victorian Liberals reckoned it was time for generational change. “This is a very strong thing in Liberal history,” says Hancock. “You don’t hold on to a safe seat if you’re going nowhere.” And enough Liberals saw Andrews as too conservative. He was remembered as the Howard-era immigration minister who cancelled the visa of Mohamed Haneef, an Indian-born doctor, whom Australian authorities had wrongly accused of being linked to a terrorist act in Britain. More recently, he was seen as a strong Abbott supporter.

In Hughes, variations of the forces of change in those other Liberal seats could now determine Craig Kelly’s fate. Hughes (named after former prime minister Billy Hughes) was once solidly Labor, until the transformation of tradies from employees to small businesspeople helped turn it Liberal in the mid 1990s.

The seat embraces the Royal National Park, south of Sydney, and adjoins Scott Morrison’s seat of Cook, facing Botany Bay, on its eastern side. Kelly, a former small businessman, has held Hughes since 2010. Moves were made to challenge him for preselection at the 2016 and 2019 elections, but Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, as respective prime ministers, intervened to stop them. Kelly won the 2019 election with almost 60 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote. That was before anyone had heard of Covid-19.

If Kelly faces another competitive bid to take his Liberal candidacy, the most likely challenger would be Kent Johns, who tried to win preselection at the last two elections. Johns has a broader political background than Kelly: once a Labor mayor of Rockdale City Council, he joined the Liberal Party when he was elected to Sutherland Shire Council, where he has been a member for seventeen years, including twice as mayor. He’s also a former vice-president of the NSW Liberal Party.

Johns is avoiding any limelight for now. But the local paper, the St George and Sutherland Shire Leader, says he’s “poised” for another preselection battle and his supporters “are confident he has the numbers to beat Mr Kelly.” Since the political explosion over Kelly’s Covid-19 crusade, three more potential preselection challengers have been reported. And an online community group, We Are Hughes, says it’s searching for an independent candidate to take on Kelly, using the electorates of Indi and Warringah as models. The group will highlight the popular complaint that Kelly seems to spend more time promoting himself and his views on social media and sympathetic radio and television shows than he does in his electorate.

“If a high-profile independent campaign does get under way in Hughes, then I predict Craig Kelly will not be the Liberal candidate,” ABC election analyst Antony Green recently tweeted. “The Liberal Party felt loyalty to support Tony Abbott in Warringah in 2019, but I doubt they will have the same view on Craig Kelly.”

A Liberal figure in Hughes takes a similar view of Kelly’s prospects if a preselection challenge happens: “Either a moderate will win or a right-winger will win. That right-winger won’t be Craig Kelly.”

Ian Hancock claims no specific feel for the twists and turns of Hughes. But from his broader perspective, he sees the responses among some Liberals to Kelly’s outlandish views as a sign that the party’s factions will play a key role in the future of Hughes.

In New South Wales, he says, the right faction revived under Bronwyn Bishop, a “factional player, a winner-take-all person” prominent during the Howard government, who herself fell victim to a preselection challenge in 2016. But that’s now changed: “The so-called moderates have come back in New South Wales. They’ve become better organised and they may want to get rid of Kelly.”

Indeed, Kelly’s views on climate and Covid-19 are so outside the mainstream that even Morrison may be too wary of the potential electoral damage to save him a second time. If so, Kent Johns could stand a chance. He’s considered a Liberal moderate, and supports a carbon-neutral economy by 2050.

To Hancock, though, another scenario is equally possible. “The factions could agree to do a deal before the election: leave Kelly in Hughes, and in return give the moderates another seat elsewhere,” he says. “The Liberals have learned from Labor to do these factional deals. I wouldn’t have thought Kelly’s days are done. It would be unwise, and a poor reading of Liberal history, to write him off. He’s a man who takes a stand on what he believes. Don’t forget that some Liberals like that.”

On one point, Hancock is pretty certain. “I’d expect any Hughes preselection contest to be held later rather than sooner,” he says. “It would be a case of ‘let’s get through this disaster and hold off for a while.’”

Hancock’s writing about the Liberals gives him a wide authority for such analysis. His biographies have covered the lives of party figures including John Gorton, a former prime minister; Tom Hughes, a former attorney-general in Gorton’s government and still, at ninety-seven, a respected legal figure; Nick Greiner, a former NSW premier; and Ainsley Gotto, Gorton’s former private secretary, who went on to a successful business career.

Hancock is working on yet another biography that will give him an even longer view of the workings of Australian conservative politics. His latest subject is Josiah Henry Symon, a father of Federation. “He arrived in Australia from Scotland in 1866 at the age of twenty with just two boxes of books,” says Hancock. “He went on to become a senator and a master criminal lawyer.” It’s a career that couldn’t be more different from that of the divisive member for Hughes. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post The moderates’ revenge appeared first on Inside Story.

Many of the thousands of Australians who started demonstrating in early June carried placards bearing the acronym of the American campaign: BLM, for Black Lives Matter. They could have added another abbreviation, CNS, for “custody notification service,” a straightforward scheme that has been shown to bring down the number of deaths in police custody in the few places where it’s been tried.

The battle to have custody notification services introduced across the country stretches back almost thirty years to the 1991 report of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. At their heart is a simple requirement: that Aboriginal people are given twenty-four-hour telephone access to legal advice once they’ve been taken into police custody. It doesn’t seem much to expect of police themselves, and it’s been shown to be effective, but until New South Wales introduced a CNS in 2000, federal, state and territory governments had ignored the option, and most still do.

The need grows ever more pressing. Even as demonstrators thronged across Australia on 6 June, with more rallies planned, the Guardian Australia revised from 432 to 434 its count of Aboriginal deaths in police and corrective services custody over the twenty-nine years since the royal commission’s report; three days later, it revised the figure again to 437. Started two years ago, the Guardian’s “Deaths Inside” project, partnered by the University of Technology Sydney, is the only up-to-date database. The Australian Institute of Criminology provides its own count, but less regularly; it stands at almost 400 deaths.

The unacceptably high arrest and incarceration rates that lie behind these numbers have not fallen since the royal commission’s report. So bad are they that the Australian Law Reform Commission conducted its own inquiry three years ago. With 3 per cent of Australia’s population, Aboriginal people comprise 27 per cent of adult prison inmates; among Aboriginal women the rate is even higher, at 34 per cent. The commission found that overall Aboriginal incarceration rates had risen 41 per cent in the decade to 2016, and the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal imprisonment had grown wider.

Consultants PwC Australia calculated that Indigenous incarceration could cost the Australian economy almost $10 billion in 2020, and twice that figure by 2040 if nothing is done.

With numbers like these, it was little wonder that the law reform commission repeated the royal commission’s call for custody notification services when it presented its report to federal attorney-general Christian Porter in late 2017. There should be a “statutory requirement for police to contact an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal service,” it said, “as soon as possible after an [Indigenous] person is detained in custody for any reason — including for protective reasons.”

This call, too, has mostly gone unheeded. Tom Calma, a senior Aboriginal figure and a member of the inquiry’s advisory committee, tells Inside Story that a CNS gives Aboriginal detainees a “friend” on the outside whom they can speak to and trust: “It’s so sad governments haven’t adopted it broadly.”

New South Wales introduced the first custody notification service in 2000. It obliges police to put Aboriginal people in touch with the state’s Aboriginal legal service once they’re taken into custody. Nadine Miles, principal legal officer of the Aboriginal Legal Service (NSW/ACT), describes what happens next: “We provide legal advice and conduct a welfare check, asking how they’re feeling, if there’s any medication they need — matters like that. We inform family members and encourage them to attend if instructed. If further conversations are needed, we call back. For police, all this reinforces the obligations under their duty of care.”

The approach has succeeded — with one fatal exception, which pointed to a simple flaw in the NSW scheme. Rebecca Maher died in a police cell in Maitland in July 2016 after being detained by police because she appeared intoxicated in the street. She was not charged with any crime. Police did not seek medical help, and nor did they put Maher in touch with the custody notification service. At the time, the law didn’t require them to take that extra step.

In her finding on Maher’s death, the acting state coroner, Teresa O’Sullivan, suggested Maher might have lived if the CNS had come into play. She criticised the fact that police were obliged to notify the service only if someone was in custody for an offence, not if he or she were detained while drunk. O’Sullivan recommended that NSW legislation be amended to cover this circumstance; it was changed in 2019.

Some lawyers agree with O’Sullivan’s call for a wider definition of police custody for the CNS; they argue it should cover a process of police arresting someone or taking any steps that bring someone under police control.

Outside New South Wales, the rollout of custody notification services has been patchy. The former federal Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, once called for a “consistent national approach,” yet it wasn’t until last year that Western Australia and Victoria legislated for their introduction. The failure to achieve national consistency boils down to one main factor: funding for legal services.

Scullion provided three-year funding for the NSW service to 2019. It was extended to 2020, and Ken Wyatt, his successor, has recently extended it again, but only for another three years. Scullion also dangled the prospect of federal funding for similar programs in all states and territories. But he insisted not only that the rest of the states and territories pass legislation to make CNS a mandatory process (as the royal commission had demanded), but also that the states pick up funding after three years. Some states have still not passed such legislation, although they claim to offer legal help for Aboriginal people in custody. And most states have been slow to offer money.

The fact that all states still don’t provide what Scullion called a “critical service” for Aboriginal people in custody seems staggering. Nadine Miles calls for a change in political will. With the states responsible for running their own criminal justice systems, she understands Canberra’s push for them to underwrite the Aboriginal legal services for CNS. “That said, the constant argy-bargy means the Aboriginal people lose out,” she says. “Funding for CNS is a constant conversation.”

Nerita Waight, of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services, says Victoria’s CNS has had about 1200 calls a month from incarcerated people since it started eight months ago. “And that’s a good month,” she adds. “It can rise dramatically.” Instead of arguing over funding, she says, governments should develop “urgent partnerships” with Aboriginal legal services: “Deaths in custody should be a paramount issue for the Commonwealth.”

On their own, custody notification services won’t stop high rates of Aboriginal imprisonment. But they can form part of a broader “justice reinvestment” approach that both the royal commission and the law reform commission recommended. This involves putting less public money into building yet more prisons and more into social programs designed to keep people out of them. It also allows Aboriginal leaders to be at the forefront of such reforms. Bourke, in outback New South Wales, has taken Australia’s most innovative approach so far, and is bringing incarceration rates down.

Governments will also have to be more upfront about recognising Australia’s historical legacy as a source of Aboriginal inequality. Nearly three decades ago the royal commission identified Aboriginal inequality as “a direct consequence of their experience of colonialism and, indeed, of the recent past.” It’s striking how Australia’s leaders by and large still shy away from debate about this central fact.

Just last week prime minister Scott Morrison responded to the outcry over George Floyd’s death in police custody in America by calling it “upsetting,” before adding: “And I just think to myself how wonderful a country is Australia.” Morrison’s complacency contrasts with the greater willingness of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau to confront a problem that festers in both countries.

On 11 June, Trudeau said that “systemic racism is an issue right across the country, in all our institutions.” He added, “It is recognising that the systems we have built over the past generations have not always treated people… of indigenous backgrounds fairly through the very construction of the systems that exist.” When Scott Morrison was questioned that same day about statues linked to slavery being pulled down in other countries amid the Black Lives Matter campaign, he dismissed the notion that Aboriginal people in Australia had ever undergone slavery: “This is not a licence for people to just go nuts on this stuff.”

As he spoke, plans for more Black Lives Matters protests were going ahead. A court had banned marches in New South Wales, citing coronavirus concerns, and Morrison had warned that those who attended could be charged. But Aboriginal leaders still see the marches having a positive impact on dealing with deaths in custody. “That’s not to say there isn’t systemic racism that stops some people from taking the issues seriously,” says Nadine Miles. “But I think we have in Australia a population who are interested in hearing more and understanding the issues.” For his part, Tom Calma sees “glimmers of hope” that the national cabinet could come to grips with these issues. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post A friend on the outside appeared first on Inside Story.

In late February, I visited Japan for the first time. Covid-19 was on the move, but it still seemed feasible to make this short, long-planned trip. Planes were flying normal schedules; lockdowns hadn’t yet begun. But all that would change with frightening speed, and Japan would soon offer an unlikely link between two scenarios of Australia in momentous conditions, one of them an imagined nuclear war, the other the pandemic we are experiencing now.

No sooner had I arrived than Japan started to close its museums and galleries. Unexpectedly, and disappointingly, I couldn’t visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, one of the country’s most historically significant places. But I was free to walk around the nearby A-Bomb Dome, the ruins of a building 600 metres beneath where America detonated the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare.

Dropped from the Enola Gay on 6 August 1945, the bomb killed an estimated 200,000 people with its blast or from burns and radiation poisoning, and obliterated the city of Hiroshima. America dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days later, bringing an end to the Pacific war that Japan had started four years earlier when it attacked Pearl Harbor with conventional bombs.

Hiroshima became a symbol for the anti-nuclear movement that emerged during the ensuing cold war. By the time Nevil Shute wrote his novel On the Beach in 1957, there was a sense that the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union could become a hot war at any minute.

Shute was a British-born aeronautical engineer and novelist who had worked for the British Admiralty during the second world war. He flew his own plane to Australia in 1948, returning two years later to settle at Langwarrin, near Melbourne. His novels about Australia, including A Town Like Alice, brought him great success, but none matched On the Beach. Capturing the fears hanging over the world of that era, it became an instant global bestseller.

On the Beach is set in 1963, in and around Melbourne, after radioactive fallout from a nuclear war between the two superpowers has obliterated life elsewhere on Earth. An estimated five months remain before the radiation will engulf Australia, too. Stanley Kramer, a Hollywood producer and director, snapped up the rights to Shute’s novel, and filmed it on location in Melbourne in 1959 with some of the biggest Hollywood stars of the day: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins.

When we think of global threats to humanity, nuclear war and pandemics usually top the list. Their impacts, of course, would be different, though no one is sure exactly how different. I had happened to visit Hiroshima in the seventy-fifth anniversary year of the atomic bombing. When I returned to Australia in early March, I was struck by a similar sense of the doom that pervades Shute’s novel and Kramer’s movie, the latter enhanced by the brilliant black-and-white imagery of the Italian cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno.

Shute’s story is one of despair at how humans have managed the world, and especially their incapacity to heed warnings. “Newspapers,” one of his characters says, suggesting how serious warnings about nuclear war could have gone out. “You could have done something with newspapers. We didn’t do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault.”

Social media may well play an even worse role in today’s silliness. Serious warnings about a global pandemic were equally overlooked. “If anything kills ten million people over the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war,” the tech billionaire Bill Gates warned five years ago. “We’ve invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents, but we have actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. We’re not ready for the next epidemic… We need to do simulations. Germ games, not war games.”

Shute would not have imagined it in 1957, but his picture of a world closing down under a nuclear catastrophe uncannily mirrors many of the social curbs and human emotions evoked six decades later by a virus that seemingly has the power to destabilise populations and devastate economies.

Melbourne’s normally bustling landmarks, such as Flinders Street Station and the forecourt at the State Library of Victoria, are almost as devoid of people today as they were at the end of Shute’s story. Australians stranded around the world have been rushing to fly back to the security of their home soil, even if it has suddenly become very insecure. Americans in On the Beach wanted to do the same thing.

In Kramer’s film, one of the most chilling yet poignant scenes involves a reconnaissance trip from Melbourne by the nuclear-powered submarine the USS Scorpion, the last surviving vessel in the American navy, to investigate a strange radar signal from the American west coast. When it reaches San Francisco Bay one of its American crew, Ralph Swain (played with a masterly American accent by the Australian actor John Meillon), jumps ship and swims to the shore of his home city, where life has ceased to exist. Ignoring a loudhailer order to return from the sub’s commander, Dwight Towers (Gregory Peck), he calls back, “I have a date on Market Street, Captain. I’m going home.”

Then, as now, the fear of a force that can change lives forever, or end them, prevails. “I’m afraid,” Moira Davidson, Ava Gardner’s character in Shute’s story, tells her old flame, the scientist Julian Osborn (Fred Astaire). “I have nobody.” On 2 April Anthony Albanese, the Labor leader, told ABC radio in Melbourne that he had walked along a queue stretching about 200 metres from the Centrelink office in his Sydney electorate, talking to people who had lost livelihoods. “Everyone is polite,” he said. “That is the nature of our community. But many of them are distraught, they’re distressed.”

In his account of Australia’s political functioning in a cold war cataclysm, Shute also presaged what is happening now. “With no aircraft flying on the airlines,” he wrote, “federal government from Canberra was growing difficult, and parliamentary sessions there were growing shorter and less frequent.”

In fact, they have now stopped. Parliament has been suspended until August, although Scott Morrison suggests it might come back for a “trial week sometime in May.” For the first time in its history, Canberra airport was closed for two days in April in the absence of scheduled flights. On 21 April, just three arrivals and three departures were scheduled.

Japan, too, portends how Australia will be isolated from the wider world. During my visit, the country had seemed to prepare for Covid-19 more seriously than Australia had. Everyone, everywhere, wore face masks, trains and buses bore special electronic signs warning against infection, hotels and restaurants insisted on visitors using hand sanitiser before entering. Japanese norms of complying with official directions had helped to keep infection rates relatively low.

By late March, even with five times Australia’s population, it had fewer cases of Covid-19 than Australia. More than 10,000 cases later, it has one-and-a-half times Australia’s number, according to the World Health Organization. Under criticism for not imposing stronger social restrictions earlier, prime minister Shinzo Abe finally declared a national state of emergency on 16 April.

Japan’s popularity as a destination for Australians had been growing, with 600,000 Australians visiting last year. Four airlines had direct flights from Japan to six Australian cities. By early April, flights had diminished to just three a week, all of them to Sydney by one airline, ANA. Richard Court, Australia’s ambassador to Japan, wrote to Australians in Japan recently warning of uncertainty about whether any flights at all to Australia would continue after 24 April.

Despite how it may have seemed, Australians are not facing the end of the world, as they were in Nevil Shute’s novel. Nevertheless, as governments splurge money, increase controls over the lives of people and businesses, and watch gingerly how global power will shape up after the emergency, many realise that the world will never be quite the same again.

There is one other difference between the Australia of Shute’s catastrophe and the current one. Far from observing social isolation back then, Australians coped with the fear of impending annihilation by partying hard.

In the Melbourne of On the Beach, “restaurants and cafes were all full, doing a roaring trade; the bars were shut, but the streets were full of drunks. The general effect was one of boisterous and uninhibited lightheartedness… There was no traffic in the wide streets but for the trams, and people swarmed all over the road. As they passed the Regal Cinema a man, staggering along in front of them, fell down, paused for a moment upon hands and knees, and rolled dead drunk into the gutter. Nobody paid much attention to him.”

It will be a while before Melbourne sees such scenes again. •

The post Off the beach appeared first on Inside Story.

Locals pour in to the Def Chef in the city’s main thoroughfare, Macquarie Street. Cong Phap Bui and Tuyen Tran bought the cafe last year. The couple arrived from their native Vietnam to study in Sydney six years ago. When their student visas expired they wanted to stay in Australia, which would be possible if they worked in a rural area for at least two years. A migration body covering Orana, the region that embraces Dubbo and about a quarter of outback New South Wales, sponsored them.

Phap recalls their first impression of Dubbo. “It was very quiet, very sunny and very hot,” he says. “There were not many people walking in the street.” Three years later, it’s a different scene. Neither Phap nor Tuyen had run a business before they went to Dubbo. They now work seven days a week, starting at 6.30am. When I managed to get a breakfast table, I noticed they have two young local women on their waiting staff; they also employ two chefs. And last June, eight months after they bought the business, they received permanent residency in Australia. “We thought of returning to Sydney, but it’s very crowded there,” says Phap. “Dubbo is very friendly, and isn’t quiet anymore!”

Stories like this are also unfolding elsewhere in town. Two more Vietnamese cafes do brisk business further along Macquarie Street. Around the corner in Talbragar Street, the Tanoshi Japanese restaurant sits opposite the Great Wall, an Asian supermarket that opened in July. Eateries in surrounding streets have created a competitive cafe culture that Dubbo locals could once only have dreamed of.

Macquarie Street looks prosperous and handsome: at one end is the 1887 post office designed by colonial architect James Barnet; at the other is the two-storey Old Bank building, now a bar crowded each night with young professionals. Between them sits the statue Dubbo unveiled last May of William Ferguson, a pioneering Aboriginal rights activist from the 1930s.

In the middle of one of Australia’s worst droughts, Dubbo projects a sense of progressive confidence. It started as a trading post in 1849 on the state’s vast western plains, when sheep, cattle and white settlers were moving in. (The Macquarie Inn, its first hotel, was licensed the same year.) Many settlements further west have since faded or become ghost towns.

Former local radio host Dugald Saunders, the Nationals MP for the state seat of Dubbo, calls the city the “capital of the west.” He estimates that about sixty multicultural groups rub along there. Ben Shields, Dubbo’s mayor, has overseen four citizenship ceremonies so far this year, admitting 134 new Australian citizens; the most recent one, in September, included people from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

At 2 per cent, Dubbo’s unemployment rate is less than half that of the state as a whole, and not much over a third of Australia’s 5.3 per cent. Its population of 43,000 people, about 14 per cent identifying as Aboriginal, is growing at a rate of 1.4 per cent a year, a feat matched by few other country areas. Australia’s overall population growth rate of 1.6 per cent, higher than average for rich countries, is driven mainly by people pouring in to the big state capital cities.

Peter McDonald, a demographer at the University of Melbourne, calculates that Dubbo and Albury-Wodonga are the two fastest-growing inland country towns in Australia; their combined populations are rising by 2000 people a year (compared with 2000 a week for Melbourne, the fastest-growing capital).

Governments have talked for decades about decentralising Australia’s population away from the big seaboard cities. Dubbo has become a showcase of how it’s finally working. Duplicating its success elsewhere, though, will be a challenge.

I first visited the Dubbo region as a student from Sydney with a summer holiday job, driving a truck laden with freshly harvested wheat to a railway silo at Geurie, a hamlet about twenty-five kilometres east of Dubbo. Back then, people talked pretty much only about two subjects: wheat and wool. Several decades later, the change is striking.

Although this year’s harvesting season is approaching, the paddocks around Dubbo won’t be yielding any grain. The ground has been too dry for farmers to grow anything. Burrendong Dam on the Macquarie River, a primary source of irrigation and town water, is just 3.7 per cent full. Plans are afoot to access water caught in the dam’s outlet valve, but this fallback step offers only an extra four months’ supply. With their river allocations stopped, farmers are competing with townsfolk for access to artesian water; but without rainfall groundwater, too, is not being replenished.

Sign of change: a stagnant Macquarie River at Dubbo. Robert Milliken

Even in normal times, agriculture had slowly ceded its economic dominance to other industries, as Dubbo grew inexorably into a service town for places like Geurie and Wellington in the east and others as far away as Bourke, about 370 kilometres west.

“No single business or industry is the mainstay now,” says Matt Wright, president of the Dubbo Chamber of Commerce. Wright runs Money Quest Dubbo, a mortgage and finance broking company. Real estate is among Dubbo’s top three industries by value. Houses in town trade for a median price of about $360,000. “Dubbo is a very competitive place to live,” says Wright. But the biggest employers are health services, retail and construction, in that order.

Geoff Wise, a former NSW western lands commissioner long involved in Dubbo’s community affairs, identifies three places whose growing service roles have helped to boost Dubbo’s economy: its stock saleyard, one of the biggest in Australia (where more sheep and cattle are now being shipped out than shipped in); its hospital; and its airport. The last place is undergoing a remarkable transformation.

Dubbo’s location at the crossroads of the Mitchell Highway to Sydney, the Golden Highway to Newcastle and the Newell Highway to Queensland had long made it a road transport hub. Sydney once offered the only direct air link to a capital city. Now, you can fly with various airlines directly to Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Newcastle as well. The airport’s passenger numbers have more than doubled in the past fifteen years. They are just one part of the airport’s boom.

I met Wright in a sprawling new cafe attached to the airport’s latest addition, the Royal Flying Doctor Service Visitor Experience. This new walk-through exhibition looks likely to rival the Taronga Western Plains Zoo at Dubbo as a major tourist drawcard. In another part of the airport’s grounds, construction was under way on the second stage of a new training base for the NSW Rural Fire Service; the first stage, bringing in volunteer firefighters from across the state, opened in July. A new flying doctor training centre has also opened at the airport. And work is due to start next year, elsewhere in Dubbo, on yet another project: a maintenance centre for a new fleet of rural and interstate passenger trains that eventually will replace the state’s entire XPT train fleet.

Dubbo hospital is growing with state and federal funds, and a new cancer treatment centre is on the way. The University of Sydney is expanding the Dubbo campus of a rural health school it runs jointly in Dubbo and Orange; part of the university’s Sydney Medical School, it is designed to train doctors in the challenges of health in rural areas. School manager Kim O’Connor says these challenges grow ever greater: “Drought, climate change, mental health and their impact on rural people are all a big worry. We need to train young people for this instead of losing them to the cities.” She hopes the new graduate program will attract local students, including Aboriginal people, but expects them to come from all over Australia.

A synergy is emerging between all these big projects. Doctors from the flying doctors’ new training centre sometimes teach at the rural health school. “Students interested in emergency medicine love it,” O’Connor says. All this opens the sort of problem that many rural communities would like to have. With low unemployment and construction projects estimated at $5 billion due over the next five years, Matt Wright worries that “there won’t be enough workers to fill the jobs.”

Earlier this year, Canberra launched the latest bid to encourage people to move to places like Dubbo. The Morrison government is offering 25,000 extra visas that will give immigrants permanent residency in Australia if they work for three years in a regional area. It has also signed Designated Area Migration Agreements, or DAMAs, with seven regions around Australia, allowing employers to sponsor skilled and semiskilled workers from overseas if they can’t find them locally.

The Orana region of the state, in which Dubbo lies, is one DAMA. Mechanics and welders, at least, will soon be in big demand there. As well as Dubbo’s planned XPT train service hub, route construction on the proposed Inland Rail freight line between Melbourne and Brisbane will happen around the small town of Narromine, about forty-five kilometres west of Dubbo.

On top of all this, a federal parliamentary committee is about to start an inquiry into strategies for encouraging migrants to settle and stay in regional areas. It’s expected to report in late 2020.

About four-fifths of Australia’s population growth, much of it driven by immigration, is happening in the three biggest cities, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and their satellite centres like Newcastle, Geelong and the Gold Coast. The Morrison government has cut immigration by 30,000 arrivals to 160,000 next year, partly as a political response to complaints about overcrowding and inadequate transport. Its bid to steer more migrants to the regions could be another string to that political strategy. At first sight, it looks plausible. One estimate suggests over four million jobs will open across Australia by 2024, about half due to the baby boomer generation’s retirement. Mark Coulton, a federal National Party MP whose electorate embraces the Orana region, says “thousands of jobs have been identified” there alone over the next decade.

But some question if a political strategy of steering more people into regional cities can work. In a paper written last year for the University of Melbourne, the demographer Peter McDonald argues that the global economy is moving towards megacities. Australia, he suggests, will be no exception: “There should not be an expectation that future growth of the Australian population… can be redirected in anything other than a minor way to regional Australia.” Cutting immigration to give the big cities breathing space, says McDonald, is “flawed logic,” a sentiment with which former senior immigration official Abul Rizvi agrees. Those cities will always have a bigger variety of jobs and greater demand for workers. If immigration can’t supply them, the big cities will draw them from other parts of Australia, meaning places like Dubbo will lose people, not gain them.

McDonald tells me that Dubbo and similar country towns are attracting young families as new residents, drawn by their promise, prosperity and affordable housing. For immigrants, though, the big test will be whether they stay after fulfilling pathways to permanent residency; “strong evidence,” he says, suggests that many then relocate to big cities. McDonald questions the government’s policy of promising extra points to immigrants if they go to a region. The approach would be more effective, he argues, if local employers had a bigger say in selecting immigrants and matching them to their regions’ specific demands.

In some Dubbo businesses, that is happening already. At least two have also managed to adapt the old mainstay, agriculture, to changing consumer tastes in the outside world.

Roger Fletcher has the classic weathered look and direct approach of an Australian whose life has been shaped by the bush. Born in Glen Innes in northern New South Wales, he started droving sheep as a teenager. His schoolteachers had a low opinion of his prospects: “They told me I might as well leave school at fifteen,” says Fletcher. “So I did. It made me a millionaire.”

Fletcher now presides over Fletcher International Exports, known as Fletchers, a family company on Dubbo’s northern edge. His wife Gail and three children are also involved in the business. Since the Dubbo plant opened almost thirty years ago, they have started a second one at Albany in Western Australia — “to help alleviate climatic risk,” says Fletcher. The company now exports lamb and sheep meat, skins, wool and grains to eighty countries. Five years ago, it started running its own freight trains from the Dubbo plant to the Port Botany export terminal in Sydney, keeping control over goods until they leave the country.

Plenty to think about: exporter Roger Fletcher.

With about 700 workers, Fletchers is Dubbo’s biggest private employer (there are 500 more staff in Western Australia). Drought has slightly dented the Dubbo workforce’s size but not its enthusiasm, or Roger Fletcher’s keenness to hire people from any background who can do the work. He also runs a training program for Aboriginal workers.

Fletcher can’t say what proportion of his staff are immigrants. “Like water, they’ll find their own tracks here. We don’t go out to recruit visa people. They just come. They’re from about thirty nationalities in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. They have all sorts of visas, including those for skilled workers. Some have bought houses and live here. One of the greatest achievements out of this is that no one group of people is above the other. It’s the best workforce I’ve ever had. And it’s happened over the past ten to fifteen years.”

What made him choose Dubbo to build his plant? “It’s the central point for sheep in eastern Australia,” says Fletcher. “A selling centre, a logical location.” Dubbo also owes its growth to the smaller towns it now services. “It wouldn’t be where it is without the back country,” says Fletcher. “It’s vitally important that we look after those towns north, south and west.”

Asked what sort of impact his business has had on Dubbo’s economy over the past thirty years, Fletcher lets out a sigh and says, “I don’t have time to think about that.” He has plenty else to think about. Fletchers’s sheep meat is slaughtered according to Halal practice and Islamic rites. Foreign customers visit the plant every day of the year. On the grain side, he worries that the drought means he has “broken the chain” with customers in Asia. “But out of all bad comes good,” Fletcher says. “Out of this drought, good things will come.”

Just beyond the white, timber Rawsonville Bridge, built over the Macquarie River west of Dubbo in 1916, Emma and Jim Elliott are at work on their farm, the Little Big Dairy. Emma’s family, the Chesworths, started the business after they moved there from the Hunter Valley fifteen years ago. Dubbo, hot, dry and drought-prone, is hardly conventional dairy country, but the family took a risk mainly for environmental reasons, says Emma: the Hunter’s coalmines were affecting its groundwater; Dubbo has more secure groundwater supplies; and Dubbo’s lower humidity and flatter landscape make life easier for cows.

The Little Big Dairy has created what might be called “niche milk.” Emma’s parents and her brother have built a herd of about 1000 Holstein cattle for milking on the farm and export as breeders. Emma and Jim market and distribute the milk in big, colourful trucks that go as far as Sydney, Canberra and Lightning Ridge. In Dubbo, they sell to supermarkets, butchers, fruit shops and cafes, including Def Chef.

Their key selling point is to call their milk “single source”: a claim that every litre can be traced to the cow it came from. High-end cafes are playing up the provenance of their milk now, “as they’ve been doing with coffee beans,” says Emma. “That’s why we’ve kept control of the distribution as well, instead of sending milk out to faceless processors.” Like Fletcher, they employ many working-visa immigrants, mainly French in their case. “They just arrive and ask for jobs,” says Emma. “It makes it easier for us because it’s hard to find local people to do farm work.”

The drought has hit them, too. Locally grown grains are no longer available to feed their cattle; they can irrigate sparingly from groundwater, but not from the Macquarie. But they think their business has contributed to Dubbo’s “high-end cafe culture,” helping to change the town’s image along the way. “People are more connected and understanding of our community than before,” says Jim, who grew up in Dubbo. “They get what we’re doing. We don’t have to explain it.”

On my last morning in Dubbo I meet Rio Paul, who works for the Dubbo Regional Council at its visitor information centre. After Rio and her husband Jerose Joseph emigrated from India, Jerose trained in Melbourne as a hospital worker. He now works as a manager at the Dubbo Base Hospital, and took Australian citizenship last year.

Both came from big cities in India, and wanted to steer clear of them in Australia. At first, Dubbo seemed a challenge for Rio. “I’d never lived in a country town and had no friends or job here,” she says. But she landed a position with a real estate firm “within minutes” of arriving. “It wasn’t as hard as I thought.” Since they arrived, Dubbo’s Indian community has grown. Many work in health services, others at Fletchers. Rio and Jerose plan to stay. They’ve bought a house, and their first child is due. “For the future generation, there are many opportunities here,” says Rio. “We’ve invested in Dubbo.”

Later that day, I set out on the six-hour journey to Sydney on one of the XPT passenger trains due to be replaced by a new model, for which Dubbo will be the service base. The train is crowded, the service efficient. A few minutes after leaving Dubbo we pass through Wongarbon, a hamlet of fine old buildings and about 700 people.

Three days earlier, I had driven there from Dubbo to meet Brett Garling, a noted sculptor and artist whose gallery was once Wongarbon’s general store. Garling sculpted the statue of William Ferguson in Dubbo’s main street, and is now working on a sculpture series to commemorate the horses that once worked in Hunter Valley coalmines.

Garling went to Dubbo High School, but he’s in no hurry to move to what has become a regional boom town. “It’s more like a city,” he says. “Now you can walk down the street and not say hello to anyone you know.” Wongarbon’s smallness, serenity and seclusion suit him fine. He shops mainly in Wellington, a once-prosperous town further east that has struggled as Dubbo has flourished. “To support Wellington,” he explains.

Perhaps it’s Garling’s life as a landscape artist that makes him challenge those who reckon Dubbo’s expansion has few limits, that its growth has really only just begun. Mayor Ben Shields, for instance, enthuses about a proposal last January from the tech billionaire Elon Musk to build a road tunnel under the Blue Mountains for $1 billion, cutting travel time west from Sydney. “That would open Dubbo up even more,” says Shields.

“I don’t agree with the forecast of 100,000 people for Dubbo in twenty years,” Garling responds. “In the middle of the worst drought, why should that be? We have a river here that can’t sustain 40,000 people, let alone 100,000. As a race, we have to reduce people as climate change takes hold. Tell farmers around here that climate change doesn’t exist and they’d laugh in your face.” Garling pauses, then concedes that Dubbo has “a whole lot of city services and opportunities the west needs.” He adds with a chuckle: “It doesn’t mean I have to like it!” •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Capital of the west appeared first on Inside Story.

Many wore white t-shirts featuring a picture of the hero of the day and the words “William Ferguson. Fighter for Aboriginal Freedom.” The Travelling Wiradjuris, a country music band comprising the region’s Wiradjuri people, played from the rotunda in the town centre, where the statue stands. Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal speakers alike — including state Nationals MP Dugald Saunders, Dubbo’s mayor Ben Shields, and journalist Jeff McMullen, an Aboriginal rights advocate — praised Ferguson. Jenny Munro, a Wiradjuri elder, told the crowd the day would be the “start of a new era that will see statues of black men and women in towns and cities all over Australia.”

How different from 1937. In June that year in Dubbo, William Ferguson launched the Aborigines’ Progressive Association, a body the likes of which Australia had never before seen. It called on Aboriginal people to take charge of their own affairs in a country that had deprived them of basic human rights.

Six months later, on Australia Day 1938, Ferguson helped to organise a Day of Mourning and Protest in Sydney, while the city thronged with crowds celebrating 150 years of white settlement. About one hundred Aboriginal people convened defiantly at Australian Hall in Elizabeth Street, a few blocks from Sydney Town Hall, where processions of sesquicentennial floats marked the triumphs of British colonialism.

The Aborigines’ conference passed a resolution condemning the “callous treatment of our people by the whiteman during the past 150 years” and calling for “a new policy which will raise our people to full citizen status and equality in the community.” (After a battle by Jenny Munro and others to save it, Australian Hall was added to the National Heritage List in 2008.)

That event was also a first. Besides Ferguson, those gathered there included William Cooper from Victoria, Jack Patten from La Perouse in Sydney, and Pearl Gibbs, who later settled in Dubbo, where a large mural of her overlooks that city’s park. The Dubbo statue could help bring the leadership of this remarkable group of people back into Australia’s historical narrative.

Born in the Riverina district of New South Wales, William Ferguson started working in shearing sheds in 1896, aged fourteen, after just two years of formal education at a mission school. He became a unionist and joined the Labor Party. Outraged at the power of the NSW Aborigines Protection Board, a body that controlled Aboriginal people’s lives on reserves, he demanded its abolition.

At the Day of Mourning conference, Ferguson described conditions he had witnessed in his travels: “The dreaded disease of TB has made its appearance among our people, and is wiping them out, right here in New South Wales.” Two months earlier, at a public meeting Cooper had called in Melbourne, Ferguson said of life on reserves, “It would be better if they turned a machine gun on us.”

William Ferguson (left) and other participants in the Day of Mourning in Sydney on Australia Day 1938, as shown in Man magazine.

Ferguson and Cooper found two unlikely allies in the white world. William Miles, a businessman, owned the Publicist, a magazine edited by Percy Stephenson, a former Rhodes Scholar and one-time communist. Known as “Inky,” Stephenson by then had become anti-British, pro-fascist and a strong Australian nationalist. Aboriginal scholar Marcia Langton and writer Jack Horner have argued that Stephenson was “probably in sympathy with the Aborigines on nationalist grounds.”

Stephenson helped arrange publication in 1938 of the Abo Call, a monthly magazine billed as “The Voice of the Aborigines,” and gave Jack Patten, its editor, a desk at the Publicist. The Abo Call was one of only two known publications to report fully the proceedings of the Day of Mourning conference. In yet another unlikely twist, the second was Man, a popular risqué magazine that also published reputable fiction and current affairs articles and pictures. Under the heading “Aborigines Meet, Mourn While White-Man Nation Celebrates” the magazine ran two pages of pictures recording the event in Australian Hall, and quoting Ferguson: “We have been ‘protected’ for 150 years, and look what has become of us.”

The Sydney Morning Herald, by contrast, ran just a six-paragraph story of the Aborigines’ conference amid pages of stories and pictures extolling “Australia’s Day of Rejoicing” and “Milestones in Australia’s March to Nationhood.” An editorial in the Age observed a bit more sharply that the Aborigine had been cast as the skeleton at the feast on Australia Day 1938.

After the Sydney conference, Ferguson and his colleagues ramped up their campaign. In late January 1938 a deputation met prime minister Joseph Lyons, his wife Enid, and interior minister John McEwen. They presented a policy known as Ten Points, which demanded that Aborigines have the same education as white people and be allowed to own land. “Why give preference to immigrants when our people have no land and no right to own land?” Ferguson asked. It called for the Commonwealth to take control of all Aboriginal affairs. That reform had to wait another twenty-nine years until Australians approved a bigger role for the Commonwealth, by a record majority, in the 1967 referendum.

The setbacks seemed interminable. In 1949, when Ferguson was vice-president of the Australian Aborigines’ League, Ben Chifley’s Labor government dismissed calls for changes Ferguson had drafted to its Aboriginal policy. Ferguson quit the Labor Party in dismay and stood for federal parliament in the 1949 election as an independent in the seat that included Dubbo. His platform centred on the newly promulgated United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, which said that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” He was not elected. Ferguson collapsed after giving his final campaign speech in Dubbo, a few metres from where his statue now stands; he died not long after, aged sixty-seven.

Among William Ferguson’s family members who gathered in Dubbo for the unveiling, Alistair Ferguson had driven from Bourke, about 370 kilometres northwest. For the past six years, Alistair has successfully pioneered a project, known as “justice reinvestment,” to cut crime and imprisonment rates among Bourke’s young Aboriginal people.

Alistair cites his great-grandfather’s battles as his inspiration. “Human rights is a work in progress right across the globe,” he says. “Martin Luther King had a dream in America in the 1960s. My great-grandfather had a dream long before that. The Bourke project is showing how William Ferguson’s work is continuing. It’s not about me. I’m just the vehicle. It’s unfinished business.”

William Ferguson’s grandson, Willie Ferguson of Lightning Ridge in northwest New South Wales, cut a striking figure in Dubbo: tall, slender, with a grey beard and swept-back grey hair, dressed in a red country shirt and black trousers. He was born just five years before William died, but recalls his grandfather as a “strong man with a strong voice.”

Willie and Rod Towney, a Wiradjuri man, lobbied the Dubbo Regional Council to support their bid for a statue of William. The state government eventually provided about $120,000; Aboriginal figures and their supporters raised extra funds.

The sculptor is Brett Garling, who owns a gallery in Wongarbon, a hamlet on the Mitchell Highway near Dubbo. “I had no idea who William Ferguson was,” says Garling. “It’s not the sort of thing we were taught in schools. Yet when I learned his story, I thought that if he was American a movie would be made about him.” Garling worked from photos of William, and used his grandson Willie to capture “basic bone structure.” The result shows William Ferguson leaning slightly forward with a rolled-up newspaper in one hand: a typical stance when he spoke to crowds in the Domain in Sydney in the late 1930s.

Madeline McGrady, a pioneering Aboriginal filmmaker, and Cliff Foley, an Aboriginal land rights campaigner, were among many who travelled to Dubbo for the event. When William Ferguson took a stand for Aboriginal rights there in 1937, Dubbo was a small town on the edge of the western plains, where wool was king. It is now one of Australia’s biggest regional cities, with almost 40,000 people, about 15 per cent of them Aboriginal. With the federal election campaign in full swing, several reflected on how far Australia had come in the eighty-two years since Ferguson’s stand.

Land rights and native title have largely been won. But some people point to quite recent events to suggest that William Ferguson’s struggle is far from over. Just twelve years ago, John Howard as prime minister harked back to the era of white supremacy when he launched the Northern Territory Intervention, sending troops to take control of seventy-three remote Aboriginal communities and suspending the Racial Discrimination Act there. The exercise had all the hallmarks of the old Aborigines Protection Board that Ferguson had fought to abolish.

There is something of a stark choice on Aboriginal policy at this election, too. Labor promises to implement the call by Aboriginal people two years ago at Uluru for a First Nations Voice to parliament, calling it the party’s “first priority” for constitutional change. The Coalition government, under Malcolm Turnbull, dismissed the proposal. “If Bill Shorten says he’ll do it,” says Rod Towney, “he needs to listen and be true to his word.”

Mark Coulton, the National Party MP for Parkes, the federal electorate that includes Dubbo, had left town earlier that morning, before the statue’s unveiling. Fighting his fifth campaign to hold the biggest federal seat in New South Wales, Coulton drove to Warialda, his hometown, ahead of visits to the towns of Menindee and Wilcannia. A crippling drought and problems with the Murray–Darling river system seemed his priorities. Nonetheless, he praised the Ferguson legacy through the achievements of Alistair Ferguson’s project at Bourke: “It’s worked so well because of the strong local ownership and leadership.”

William Ferguson’s statue is bound to leave an even more enduring legacy, perhaps helping to head off another heavy-handed government policy like the Intervention. “A sculpture opens people’s minds and imaginations, and lets them learn why he’s there,” says Brett Garling, the sculptor. “He was a game changer.” •

The post The game changer appeared first on Inside Story.

Whispers and nervous titters rippled through the audience at the ornate Royal Automobile Club in Sydney. Triggs had just survived public attacks from Tony Abbott and other Coalition ministers over her report on the plight of child asylum seekers in detention. It had been one of the most brutal government character assassinations of a senior statutory official Australia has seen. Was Laundy about to nettle her even more?

On the contrary. He praised Triggs for her work and encouraged her to keep doing the job that Abbott and attorney-general George Brandis had reportedly tried to make her leave. “My door is always open to you,” he told her. She nodded an acknowledgement as the audience applauded.

Of course, an attack on Triggs would have made Laundy an outsider in this crowd. His fellow speakers included race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane and former Fraser government minister Fred Chaney, who launched Soutphommasane’s book I’m Not Racist But… at the same event. Mark Dreyfus, the shadow attorney-general, also spoke, and so did Penny Wright, an Australian Greens senator.

Where Laundy really has emerged as an odd man out is among his fellow conservatives since he entered parliament at the 2013 election. He stood up for Triggs in the Coalition party room in February, arguing that the real point should be to release children from detention. He threatened to cross the floor against the Abbott government’s plan to change the Racial Discrimination Act to allow hate speech; the government dropped the plan in August.

And last Friday, while Abbott was trumpeting his government’s “stop the boats” policy as Europe’s refugee crisis unfolded, Laundy publicly pleaded for Australia to take more refugees from Syria. “There but for the grace of God go any of us,” he said. His stand flew in the face of a powerful portion of the Liberal Party’s conservative base that opposes bringing in more refugees, but his electoral office was swamped with emails from the public, about 90 per cent of which supported him.

Laundy is an odd Liberal out in other ways, too. He is a small businessman in a party that once identified as the champion of small business but whose front bench is now dominated by lawyers, ex-lobbyists, political advisers and party officials. He is a liberal in a party that has shifted sharply to the right under its last two prime ministers, Abbott and John Howard. And he refuses to identify with the factions that now determine power in the Liberal Party. “I see myself as my own voice,” he says.

I met Laundy in late August in Burwood, one of the inner-western suburbs that make up his electorate of Reid. Named after Australia’s fourth prime minister, George Reid, the seat was for many years a Labor stronghold; incumbents have included former NSW premier Jack Lang and former Whitlam government minister Tom Uren. But Labor’s comfortable margin was cut when a 2010 redistribution brought in much of the neighbouring electorate of Lowe. Three years later the national anti-Labor swing made Laundy – as he later told parliament – “the first Liberal to hold this seat since it was formed” in 1922.

Yet the broader electoral geography still leaves him something of an outsider. Reid is surrounded to the south and west by the traditional western Sydney Labor seats held by opposition frontbenchers Anthony Albanese, Tony Burke, Jason Clare and Julie Owens. Once a working-class Anglo-Australian region, it is now a multicultural heartland. In Burwood alone, almost 60 per cent of citizens were born overseas, many in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and eastern Europe. Laundy reckons his seat is the second most multicultural in federal parliament, after Burke’s seat of Watson next door.

Outwardly, at least, Laundy seems a classic figure of old Australia. At forty-four, he is tall and boyish-faced, and on the day we meet he is dressed smartly in business trousers and a blue pin-striped shirt with no tie. His electoral office in Burwood Road is sparely furnished, with no sign of the lavish use of entitlements that had felled Bronwyn Bishop a couple of weeks earlier.

Laundy’s family story seems classic rags-to-riches. His paternal grandfather, Arthur, left an orphanage at the age of fifteen “with just the clothes on his back” and bought a hotel lease twelve years later. The family business, in which Craig worked for twenty-three years before entering politics, now comprises more than fifty hotels in New South Wales. Laundy still seems to identify as much as a businessman as he does a politician. “I’m a third-generation western suburbs publican,” he tells me.

He joined the Liberal Party only eighteen months before successfully contesting the 2013 election. And he reckons he is one of the first of what he calls a “Labor family on both sides” to support the Liberals, adding yet another layer of complexity to his outsider’s profile.

What attracted him to politics, and especially to the Liberal Party? “I was very frustrated with the former Labor government,” he says. “I believe in small government, low taxation and a genuine safety net. I thought that becoming an MP may be a chance to make a difference. I’d grown up in the western side of the electorate, the Labor side, and I had tentacles there through my involvement with churches, charities and sporting clubs. I have a lot of mates from my small business background who would never go into politics. They think I’m mad. So does my father!”

Laundy’s responses to social issues during his short parliamentary life have been driven by his practical business mind and family life, not by the ideology that drives some sections of the Liberal Party. His stand against the proposed change to the Racial Discrimination Act angered many on the party’s right. But, he says, it also reflected opposition to the change among his multicultural constituents.

“They believe that free speech is a right in Australia, and that rights also involve responsibilities. My pragmatic argument says that too. Pragmatic thinkers on both sides of parliament are in the minority. Ideological thinkers on both sides are in the ascendancy.”

Laundy’s support for Triggs’s call to stop incarcerating child asylum seekers also won him few fans in his party. “If there are findings of hers that allow us to run things better, we should accept them in good faith and act upon them,” he says. This hardly chimes with Abbott’s dismissal of Triggs’s report as a “political stitch-up.” Laundy also wants a more inclusive approach from government to Australia’s Muslim community, despite the Abbott government’s pursuit of a national security policy that seems to cast them as potential enemies.

“There is a marginalised Muslim minority heading to jihad,” he says. “You have to question the cause of the problem first, and I think that’s been missed. The second or third generations of Australian-born eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds have battled with education and finding jobs. That’s where susceptibility is born. We have to stop them ending up at the plane gate to Syria and Iraq. The Australian public responds negatively, and the vicious circle makes them more marginalised. The role of leadership, in government and the communities, is to step in and break the circle. It’s a long-term exercise.”

On same-sex marriage, though, Laundy is not rocking any Liberal boats. He and his wife Suzie attend Catholic churches in the electorate with their three children, and he opposes same-sex marriage on grounds of that faith. At first, he supported a conscience vote in parliament. “The conscience vote that the Liberal Party stands for is important to me,” he tells me. “I would never be a member of a party that you can’t vote against if you want.”

He was later reported to have changed his mind, and to oppose a conscience vote, on this issue at least. But since the bitter Coalition party-room debate in August, which endorsed the government’s opposition to same-sex marriage, Laundy says he once again has an “open mind” on a conscience vote. He argues that the debate has become “aggressive” on both sides, and that those who chose to vote against gay marriage could be vilified. “On the gay marriage side, I’m criticised as a bigot and a homophobe, which I’m definitely not. But I see fault on both sides.”

A few days after our meeting, Laundy escorted foreign minister Julie Bishop to Burwood Girls High School, one of Australia’s most multicultural schools, where she addressed senior students, including some from neighbouring schools. Bishop spoke about women and careers, and fielded questions from the girls about Australia’s human rights record and military involvement in the Middle East. But her visit was quickly swamped by a row over same-sex partners and censorship that erupted a few days later.

The school had planned to show Gayby Baby, a documentary about children of same-sex parents made by Maya Newell, a former student at the school. It had already been shown at the Sydney and Melbourne film festivals, and at Parliament House in Sydney. Two days before the scheduled school screening on 28 August, the Daily Telegraph splashed a front-page story headed “Gay Class Uproar,” with the banner “Parents outraged as Sydney school swaps lessons for PC movie session.”

It later emerged that parents had been informed of the screening and given the option of not allowing their daughters to attend. But the furore sparked by the Murdoch tabloid was enough for NSW education minister Adrian Piccoli to order a ban on screenings of Gayby Baby at all the state’s schools during class times. (It passed unremarked that Julie Bishop’s address at the Burwood school had also happened during class hours.)

Laundy publicly supported his state Liberal colleague’s ban on the film. After talks with local parents and community leaders, he claimed “many parents” were concerned the screening in school hours “may create difficulties for their children on the basis of their family’s religious or personal beliefs.”

Beyond this issue, though, Laundy finds his inherent liberalism frequently stalled by the realities of life in politics. If frustrations with the former Labor government drove him into politics in the first place, the process of achieving change as a parliamentarian troubles him just as much, if not more. Again, he comes back to a business analogy.

“In small business it’s about outcomes, not process. My criticism of politics is that the focus is on process ahead of outcomes. In business, before I renovated hotels I talked to staff and customers and worked out what they wanted, then made a decision. In politics, cabinet makes the decision, but then hands the policy to the marginal backbench seat-holders and tells them to go out and sell it. That’s counterintuitive. After two years in politics, the pace of change and the length of time to get decisions is frustrating for me.”

The trend on both sides of politics to recruit candidates from within the party machine makes things even more frustrating for those from a broader background like Laundy’s. “They know the system from a young age and are prepared to live within it. For people like me who come from outside, it’s a big change to make.”

With a federal election due in just a year, Laundy doesn’t conceal a sense of irritation over the Abbott government’s inertia on economic reform. “I get frustrated when discussions are about do we apply a GST on tampons. You should be talking about reforming the whole tax system, as well as federation, and preparing the country for the next forty years.”

The Abbott government’s entrenched opinion poll deficit has rattled many backbenchers, especially those who may have nowhere to turn for lives outside politics if the government falls in 2016 and they lose their seats. On this score, Laundy once again could be an odd man out. He won Reid in 2013 with a 3.5 per cent swing. But if the still-marginal seat eventually swings back to Labor, he will be happy to say he tried. “I’d rather lose my seat standing for something, and standing for reform, than govern for the sake of governing,” he says. And if that happened? “I can go back to my family business job any time.” •

The post The Liberal nonconformist from Sydney’s west appeared first on Inside Story.

As Inside Story reported in September, Bourke’s Aboriginal community formed a partnership with Just Reinvest NSW, a Sydney-based body, to start the project. It had a pressing cause. About a third of Bourke’s 3000 people identify as Aboriginal, and for more than twenty years this community has had the state’s highest rates of juvenile crime and domestic violence. Old government law-and-order methods, costing billions of dollars, were simply not working.

The Bourke people called their alternative the Maranguka Justice Reinvestment Project (Maranguka means “caring for others” in Ngemba, a local language). Its underlying strategy, drawn from the Soros think tank, is that governments should stop building yet more prisons and divert the funds to community projects designed to help people stay out of them.

Five years after the Bourke project started, its dividends are proving impressive. After following its progress, the accounting firm KPMG produced a report in late November estimating a “gross impact” of $3.1 million in 2017. About two-thirds came from lower costs in the justice system, and the rest from broader savings in the Bourke region.

Even more striking were improvements in the main areas where justice reinvestment has focused in Bourke: domestic violence, juvenile crime and early childhood development. KPMG reported a 23 per cent drop in police-recorded domestic violence in 2017; a 31 per cent rise in Year 12 student retention rates; a 38 per cent fall in five main juvenile offence categories; a 14 per cent cut in bail breaches; and a 42 per cent reduction in days spent in custody.

KPMG estimates that the project’s $3.1 million economic impact was five times the $600,000 cost of running it in 2017, much of which came from state and federal government contributions. (Substantial extra philanthropic backing comes from the Dusseldorp Forum and the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation.) If Bourke can sustain even half the economic results achieved in 2017, says KPMG, “an additional gross impact of $7 million over the next five years could be delivered.”

The changes stem from at least one key departure from the time when Bourke’s Aboriginal community was beholden to policies set by governments in faraway Sydney and Canberra. This has been the involvement of Bourke’s Indigenous community itself in guiding the justice reinvestment approach. Alistair Ferguson, a local Indigenous man, helped to create two bodies to get it going. One is the Bourke Tribal Council, which represents Bourke’s twenty-two language groups and makes decisions about strategy. The other is Maranguka, a community hub where local Indigenous officers meet daily with police to monitor any trouble cropping up with young people. The cooperation of Bourke’s police force, headed by Greg Moore (no relation to youth worker James Moore, pictured above), has been another part of the project’s success.

The KPMG report was launched at the state Parliament House in Sydney before a room of parliamentarians and other notables. They included Tom Calma, a former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner, who was among the first to call for justice reinvestment trials in Australia. Sarah Hopkins, a Sydney-based lawyer who heads Just Reinvest NSW, told the room, “When we say justice reinvestment is Aboriginal-owned and led, we think of Tom Calma.”

Brad Hazzard, the NSW health minister, who has followed the Bourke project, said the number of Aboriginal people in prisons statewide “remains appalling.” Maranguka had shown “the solution has to be the empowerment of the people themselves.”

But the KPMG report also places the onus on governments to look at changing their approaches to locking people up. It will put pressure on them to take seriously the idea that prison money can be better spent on community-led early intervention to steer vulnerable young people away from crime. The Coalition government, for instance — to which Hazzard belongs — announced almost $4 billion in 2016–17 for what it boasted to be the “largest single prison expansion in the state’s history.”

The report offers four possible models for a “core unanswered question” about justice reinvestment: how to reinvest prison funds in Bourke and elsewhere. These include diverting savings from building fewer prisons towards preventing crime; rewarding communities for achievements that cut costs for governments; doing more to encourage communities to work on their own solutions; and encouraging seed funding from private donors to secure government grants related to crime prevention.

Alistair Ferguson missed the Sydney launch. He was busy in Bourke with Mick Gooda, another Indigenous leader and early justice reinvestment advocate. When I caught up with him in Sydney last Friday, he had just spoken to a seminar in Canberra, where the ACT government has embarked on justice reinvestment trials, and was preparing for “cross-leadership” meetings involving the Bourke project later in December in Sydney, Dubbo and Bourke.

Despite the KPMG report’s positive assessment, the Bourke project that Ferguson initiated has no plans to wind back. “It shows quite an achievement,” he says of the report. “It’s got to the point where stakeholders now have to consider where and how to reinvest.

“Who’ll take those decisions? It doesn’t mean I’ll be sitting in a dark room making nocturnal decisions about spending that money saved from the criminal system. We’ll be making those decisions as a community. It will be a case of sitting down with police, family and community services and the Bourke Shire Council, co-designing it with the Aboriginal community.”

Ferguson nominates education, jobs and vocational training among areas where prison money could be invested better. Then he spells out why governments can’t ignore the changes at Bourke: “First Nations people have provided a compelling case that this can’t be done without our involvement. What gets overlooked is how willing Aboriginal communities are to roll up our sleeves and address legacy issues.” •

The post Breakthrough at Bourke appeared first on Inside Story.

Bourke is pioneering Australia’s most innovative way of tackling a problem haunting many parts of the country: the shockingly high rate of incarceration among young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Of Bourke’s 3000-strong population, about a third identify as Indigenous. Before the scheme started having an impact, the town had the state’s highest conviction rate for Aboriginal children and teenagers under seventeen, and about 90 per cent of young people released from custody were in trouble with the law again a year later.

“We’d been left to die slowly,” is how Alistair Ferguson, a local Indigenous man, describes his community’s fate under past government policies. “But Bourke and outback river towns are worth fighting for.” Fed up with billions of dollars of government money being poured into the “old law-and-order approach,” with little to show for it, Ferguson turned to an idea developed by the Open Society Institute, a New York think tank run by the American billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Known as “justice reinvestment,” the strategy is based on the argument that the money governments spend building yet more prisons should instead go to projects designed to help people stay out of them.

It is Ferguson’s initiative that eventually brings this group of expert backers to Bourke for a crucial “leadership group” meeting. Five years after introducing justice reinvestment to his town, he opens their gathering at Diggers on the Darling by declaring, “We are on the road to recovery.”

My own 800 kilometre journey from Sydney to Bourke — still one of Australia’s most isolated places — revealed much about the town’s vivid frontier history and its disastrous legacies for Indigenous people. From the 1880s, Bourke was a booming port handling wool bound for world markets via the Darling River. The press called it the “Chicago of the West.” In 1885, jealous at seeing its wool exported to Britain via Victoria and South Australia, the state government extended the rail line to Bourke so it could be shipped from Sydney instead.

The last 186 kilometres of this great piece of late-nineteenth-century infrastructure was closed down in 1990, and now lies crumbling beside the dead-straight road from Nyngan to Bourke. The remnants of Bourke’s wharf, where Darling River steamers once loaded multitudinous bales of wool (40,000 a year at its peak), have fared a bit better, and it’s there that Alistair Ferguson spoke to me between a stream of meetings with summit participants.

Ferguson, an energetic man with close-cropped greying hair, was born in Brewarrina, a nearby town on the Darling. He traces his own heritage to four states, and has family links with Barkindji, one of four tribal groups that were living in this region when white settlers began arriving in the mid 1860s. As the historian Bobbie Hardy writes in her book Lament for the Barkindji: The Vanished Tribes of the Darling River Region, some tribes “disappeared early under the impact of white settlement, and their conquerors were less than explicit as to the fate that overtook them.”

The Back O’ Bourke Exhibition Centre at North Bourke is a bit more explicit. In its small section on “The Traditional People,” it quotes an early settler: “The blacks on the Darling had been most barbarously murdered by our early predecessors, hunted like kangaroos or wild dogs wherever they were known to exist.”

Governments removed many Aboriginal people from traditional lands, and later brought others from outside the region to mission stations at Bourke. The thoughtless mixing of rival groups changed the makeup of the area, expanding the region’s four tribal groups to twenty-two in Bourke today. Ferguson and others see that dispossession and loss of identity as the main underlying cause of high crime rates.

Ferguson, who had planned to be a chef after he left high school in Bourke, became a public servant in the Bourke office of the state attorney-general’s department. From there he watched in despair the “constant revolving door of young people in handcuffs” at the local courthouse. Using Bourke’s twenty-first century lifeline to the world, the internet, he learned about trials of justice reinvestment in around twenty-four states in the United States, and in Britain. Tom Calma and Mick Gooda, both former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioners, had already called for similar trials in Australia.

“I became intrigued,” says Ferguson. “I wanted to know more.” In 2012 he approached Sarah Hopkins, a Sydney-based lawyer and chair of Just Reinvest NSW, a body advocating justice reinvestment as public policy. The following year, Just Reinvest and Ferguson formed a partnership to start a project in Bourke. “We didn’t go to Bourke,” Hopkins says. “They came to us.” She is keen to stress the Aboriginal community’s determination to find a new approach to solving its problems that didn’t leave it beholden to governments. “Self-determination is fundamental to justice reinvestment,” she says.

A “lot of moving parts” soon came together, says Ferguson. The Australian Human Rights Commission and the state Aboriginal affairs office offered early support; Gilbert and Tobin, a law firm, pitched in later. The first funding, in 2014, came not from governments but from two family philanthropic outfits: the Dusseldorp Forum and the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation. Along with money from smaller family foundations, this allowed the project to kickstart with a backbone of staff in Bourke.

A September 2016 report prepared free of charge by accounting firm KPMG found that philanthropic funding for the project had amounted to $554,800 each year over the three years to 2018–19. It argued that the early progress and the goodwill the project had attracted made a strong enough case for governments to get behind it.

Teya Dusseldorp, the Dusseldorp Forum’s executive director, is a granddaughter of its founder, the late Dick Dusseldorp, who also founded the Lend Lease construction company. She visited Bourke at Ferguson’s invitation when he was trying to get something started. “We could see the real desire of the Bourke community to be drivers of change for their town,” she says. “I found that far more promising than people just advocating to governments. They wanted to confront the problems they identified of too many young people being incarcerated. There were enough people there who wanted to be part of designing the solutions themselves, rather than waiting for government to fix things.”

Goodwill was palpable when the fifty-odd people gathered at Diggers on the Darling on 30 July. There was something symbolic about the fact that the meeting was taking place across the road from the Darling River, where Henry Lawson set several short stories drawing on his time in Bourke in 1892. Lawson sharply observed the region’s swagmen, riverboat captains and other pioneer characters, but Indigenous people featured in his stories only fleetingly as part of the exotic frontier backdrop.

“Finding a balance from the first nations’ perspective isn’t an easy thing to do,” Ferguson told the meeting. But now, the descendants of Lawson’s largely invisible people were telling a story of trying to reverse a downward spiral that had started back then. By any standards, it has a promising ring of success.

A report to the meeting showed a sharp drop in juvenile crime last year. Break-and-enter offences fell by about half. At Bourke Primary School, 4 per cent of Aboriginal students were suspended, a dramatic reduction from about 20 per cent four years earlier, though the fall in suspensions at Bourke High School was not so impressive. The proportion of children going to school, and staying there, has risen.

One of the most encouraging shifts involved domestic violence committed by Aboriginal men. Unemployment, alcohol and dislocation have long made this a problem in Bourke: reoffending rates per capita are among the highest in Australia. And its reverberations spread to the streets, where children forced to flee violent homes embark on crimes of their own. The meeting heard that the proportion of adult men charged with domestic violence had almost halved since 2014.

This news preceded the opening of a new “Men’s Space,” further along the Darling, later that afternoon. The substantial block of land and modest brick house on the edge of Bourke was donated by the Sisters of Charity, a Catholic group. Ironically, it was once a prison site; but now, says Jonathon Knight, an Aboriginal man who works with a group called Men of Bourke, it will become a place where “men can come to seek help and feel comfortable.” His hope is that “we can be role models for our community.”

A group of Aboriginal children and young men had gathered for the event, and five nuns had travelled from Orange in New South Wales to join a Catholic priest in blessing the Men’s Space. (One of them recalled how the Indian missionary, Mother Teresa, had visited Bourke fifty years ago to bless the sisters’ land.) Led by several Aboriginal women, the men, black and white, walked in a semicircle through a smoking ceremony under a magnificent river red gum tree.

Brad Hazzard, the NSW health minister, was among them. “I still shake my head in wonder as to why so much state and federal resources are coming into regional towns and not achieving the outcomes we want,” Hazzard told the Bourke meeting. He offered as one explanation the politics in some Aboriginal communities: “They make Labor and Liberal look like a bunch of amateurs.” After recent leadership turmoil in Canberra, he may be right.

Yet that seemed to miss a key point. The Bourke community’s creation of the Men’s Space is one example of its bid to take pressure off a key cause of crime in its midst. “Do they have the right to make decisions for us?” asks Phil Sullivan, a Bourke elder, referring to governments. “We’re still not in the Constitution you know! I think the justice reinvestment approach, a tool to do what we want to do, is a perfect start.”

Like most governments in Australia, the Coalition to which Hazzard belongs beats a law-and-order drum relentlessly. In its 2016–17 budget, the NSW government announced almost $4 billion for what it called the “largest single prison expansion in the state’s history.” Yet Hazzard seems impressed with what he has seen in Bourke. “The men here say they asked for the Men’s Space,” he tells me after the smoking ceremony. “No central office dreamed it up. The ground-up mode means the community owns the process and the outcomes. My instinct tells me that is the most likely recipe for success.”

When he embarked on justice reinvestment in Bourke, Alistair Ferguson built crucial new links into the project. He involved local Aboriginal people by helping to create two bodies: a community hub called Maranguka (“caring for others” in Ngemba, a local tribal language), and the Bourke Tribal Council, representing the town’s twenty-two language groups, whose role is to make decisions about strategy.

“This concept, allowing the community to be the decision-makers, isn’t new,” Ferguson says. “It’s been here for thousands of years. It got lost after white settlement pushed traditional structures away.”

He also insisted on involving Bourke’s police force as key players. Too often around Australia, high imprisonment rates have followed combative relationships between police and Indigenous communities. Greg Moore, Bourke’s police chief, presides over a staff of about forty-five police; he is also commander of a larger force that serves other outback districts in the state’s northwest. He has keenly embraced justice reinvestment, which he sees as a way to “shift the focus from building prisons to addressing the causes that feed crime in the first place.”

“In the old days, you had the cops, health, education and the local council,” Moore says. “That was about it.” Of the new Aboriginal bodies, he says, “We set these structures up so the community could have greater involvement in decision-making and resolving community conflicts. The community has always said, ‘We want policy designed with us, not on us.’”

Greg Moore identifies domestic violence, mental health, alcohol, drugs, idleness and truancy among the main underlying causes of Bourke’s high Aboriginal youth conviction rate. They are the same as those revealed twenty-seven years ago in a royal commission the Hawke government set up to examine Australia’s then alarmingly high rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody and juvenile detention. That inquiry said the main way to stop rates climbing even higher was for governments to tackle these causes first. But since then incarceration rates have only doubled, according to Amnesty International.

While governments have ignored the royal commission’s recommendation, Ferguson says he has taken it as his template. The work starts every morning at the Maranguka hub office in Bourke. James Moore (no relation to Greg), the Birrang SOS (“Save Our Sons, Save Our Sisters”) youth coordinator, meets there with police to review any trouble in town overnight.

Moore is a local Aboriginal man who left school without finishing Year 10. He fell foul of the law himself and spent time in jail. He understands the problems of the people aged between eight and eighteen whom he now tries to help: “Like them, I felt disconnected and had little sense of belonging.” This understanding, and working with kids to encourage more positive outlooks, is probably the key to Bourke’s justice reinvestment project. It was missing from long-time government approaches in Sydney and Canberra: setting policy from a distance, and sending welfare to the town.

“Because of a lack of jobs, a lot of families depend on welfare,” James Moore explains. “Kids just dropped out of school. Many fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds were on police radar every day. Maranguka asked, what can we do to help them? My role is to change their mindset, to work towards getting jobs.” SOS was set up last year to encourage kids to go back to school.

Maranguka has also set up a youth council to discuss proposals from Moore and his colleagues, and contribute their own ideas. “It’s all about giving them a voice,” says Moore. “In the past, young people never had a say in anything.” The council consists of local young Aboriginal role models and “other more vulnerable ones.”

Moore also works with an Alternative Education Program, to equip young people with job skills. Bourke’s schools identified twelve kids who they thought could benefit. Moore says the twelve had about 300 “interactions” with police between them in the three months before the program; in the three months after it started, police interactions had fallen to fourteen. Meanwhile, school attendance rates among the twelve have risen.

Another initiative exposes young people to environments outside Bourke. James has taken some to Nowra, on the NSW south coast, for boot camps on leadership and life skills. “It’s all based on discipline, respect and responsibility,” he says. Closer to home, he takes young people out “on country” to connect them with traditional cultural practices. “Culture today is the answer for our vulnerable kids,” he says. “It should be part of day-to-day routine for Aboriginal people.”

Vivianne Prince, whose parents are Ngemba and Wangukmarra people, coordinates services at Maranguka. Each Thursday, school principals and other town officials join the meetings. “It means everyone is working together, breaking a silence,” says Prince. “If a pupil has been suspended from school, everyone knows. Evidence shows the children are benefiting from this approach. They’re getting the support they need.”

Leonie Brown, corporate services manager of Bourke Shire Council, tells me the council has supported justice reinvestment “since Alistair put it together.” With jobs scarce on the region’s great sheep stations nowadays, especially during the drought, the council is one of Bourke’s biggest employers. An abattoir, due to open in Bourke this year, could offer up to 200 jobs.

“A lot of government and non-government money comes into Bourke,” says Brown. “Incarcerating youth is a big cost. If we can stop that, and reinvest it, this is one way of working through those problems.” She praises Greg Moore as police chief for his “supportive” approach, helping to bring crime down: “You can see the difference.”

I sensed a difference myself since my last visit to Bourke, in 2010. On that occasion, I was reporting on another intractable issue: water. Crime then seemed out of control. Among the handsome old stone and wrought-iron buildings from Bourke’s grander days, shops were shuttered with steel grids. The town had a sense of siege.

Eight years later the shutters are still there, but the siege sense has waned. Perhaps wary, Bourke’s business figures largely had held back from engaging with justice reinvestment. Now, though, some are happy to commend it.

“It’s doing what it should be doing: getting kids off the street. It’s a marvellous thing,” says David Randall, manager of the Betta Home Living electrical goods shop in Oxley Street. “Eight years ago, you wouldn’t have contemplated that I might take my shutters down. Now I’m contemplating it. It’s very rare that we have problems with hardened kids any more. A lot has to do with attitudes of the police, who are getting involved before crime happens.”

Across the street Peter Crothers, the pharmacist at the Towers Drug Co (“An outback icon since 1878”), says Bourke had long suffered from a “feeling of powerlessness.” He adds, “All decisions were made on how money was spent without reference to the community. What’s happened since justice reinvestment started is that Aboriginal, non-Aboriginal, local government, community associations, business and professional people have all said, ‘Just give us the money and let us work out what needs to be done.’ We’ve started in this town trying to address a different way. Unlike any community I have worked in, we have started to say, ‘We’re special.’”

Support is growing for projects like the one in Bourke. Although none is as advanced as Bourke’s, other justice reinvestment trials are planned or getting started at Katherine, in the Northern Territory, Cherbourg, in Queensland, and in the Australian Capital Territory and South Australia.

The Australian Human Rights Commission calls it a “powerful crime prevention strategy.” The Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee five years ago recommended that the Commonwealth “adopt a leadership role” to support justice reinvestment and that it fund a trial with “at least one remote Indigenous community.” In a report last March, the Australian Law Reform Commission called on federal, state and territory governments to establish an independent justice reinvestment body to “promote the reinvestment of resources from the criminal justice system to community-led, place-based initiatives that address the drivers of crime and incarceration.”

So far, governments show little inclination to take this on. Beating the law-and-order drum seems calculated to win them more plaudits from tabloids and shock jocks than cutting spending on prisons. Yet the 2016 KPMG report on Bourke offered a cogent economic case for a different approach. It contrasted the justice reinvestment project’s estimated running cost of $554,800 a year with the estimated $4 million annual cost to the Bourke area’s criminal justice system of Aboriginal children and young people’s involvement in crime. KPMG is preparing another report on the Bourke project’s economic impact.

Its achievements so far have prompted the federal and NSW governments to commit $2.5 million up to 2022 towards cutting family violence, helping young people to find jobs and enabling the Maranguka team to collect more data. The project’s influential private backers are impressed. “We have a long-term commitment to this work, because that is what it will take,” says Teya Dusseldorp. “We’re talking about generational change. Maranguka is one of the most promising initiatives I’ve seen. They’ve been very effective in building a bridge between community and government to last.”

Alistair Ferguson reckons the “reinvestment” side of justice reinvestment is now in sight. Bourke’s crime reduction, he argues, could warrant redirecting a quarter of its $4 million spend on criminal justice into more work helping the town’s young people. “That will be the real turning point.” When? “It can’t come soon enough.” ●

Robert Milliken returned to Bourke later in 2018; his short followup report is here.

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Storer entered parliament in February amid the continuing fallout of the dual citizenship drama that has shaken the upper house. He had stood at the 2016 election for the Nick Xenophon Team in South Australia, but lost. When one of the party’s successful candidates, Skye Kakoschke-Moore, resigned in November after she discovered she was a dual citizen, the High Court declared Storer her replacement. Having already quit Xenophon’s party, he took his seat as an independent.

Barely a month later, he sprang to national prominence when he denied Malcolm Turnbull’s government a crucial vote it needed to pass its proposed company tax cuts. He also opposed most of the government’s income tax cuts, which passed the Senate late last week. He could play a pivotal role again when the government brings back the company tax cuts this week.

At first glance, Storer looks like someone who would agree with Turnbull’s key argument for both sets of tax cuts: to stimulate enterprise. But the senator’s standpoint, like his political background, is more complex than it seems. He joined the Labor Party in 1996, but his membership lapsed after he embarked on an MBA degree at the Australian National University, having already studied economics at the University of Adelaide. He rejoined Labor in 2013.

The dates are striking. In his Parliament House office, I asked if his Labor membership was a reaction to the fact that John Howard and Tony Abbott, two of Australia’s most conservative leaders, took the prime ministership in precisely those years. At forty-eight, with square-rimmed glasses and neat, dark hair, Storer has the fit, bookish look of someone quite a bit younger. He seems unfazed by the question, and offers an unexpected answer.

It was triggered, he says, more by his support for a policy that Howard and Abbott did their best to kill: a republic. “I have long been passionate about it,” he says. “It’s entirely logical in a self-determining nation that we should have our own head of state, chosen by us in a way that reflects the democratic basis of our country.”

Storer put it more potently in his Senate maiden speech in May: “It’s ironic and telling that to be a member of this chamber you cannot hold British citizenship, but you must be British to be our head of state.”

Paul Keating, as Labor prime minister, pushed the republic cause during the nineties, but Storer saw the issue fade away under governments of both sides. “I felt I shouldn’t just sit on my hands,” he says, explaining his decision to rejoin Labor in 2013. Three years later, his membership having lapsed once again, some of the ideas the Nick Xenophon Team was promoting — including corporate and government transparency, and controls on gambling — drew him to that party.

Xenophon quit the Senate last year to contest the South Australian state election in March. Having stood for the Xenophon party in 2016, Storer reckoned he was best fitted to fill Xenophon’s Senate seat; Xenophon declined to nominate him. “We disagreed,” says Storer. He left the Nick Xenophon Team late last year, and joined the Senate as an independent when the High Court declared him elected.

Under the rules that gave some Senate places from the 2016 double dissolution election longer terms than others, Storer’s term is due to expire in June 2019. So now he is forming his own party, the Tim Storer Independent SA Party. He plans to contest the next federal election, but not to field other candidates under his party for either federal house. “Just myself,” he says. Running with a party name will get him “above the line” on the ballot paper, and thus likely more attention from voters than if his name was grouped with other independents.

If Storer’s quest to become a longer political fixture succeeds, his background — an intriguing mixture of social liberal and free marketeer — offers clues as to how he could use his Senate power.

Storer was born in 1969 in Loxton, a town on the Murray River. In itself, he told the Senate, that meant “a feeling of idyllic freedom, of imagination and time, and a sense of higher purpose.” Growing up during a progressive political decade in South Australia, a time when old ways were being questioned under the Labor governments of Don Dunstan, might have helped trigger Storer’s republican instincts. Yet his parents, and the Catholic schools he attended in Loxton and Adelaide, seem to have been important influences on his liberalism, too.

His father was a doctor, and his mother an English teacher. “Alongside their own careers, they emphasised having a sense of fairness, equity and social justice towards other people,” Storer says. In his maiden speech, he recited lines from the “Prayer for Generosity” he had learned at St Ignatius’ College in Adelaide. Little wonder, then, at some issues on which Storer signals he will push for change.

He wants a bigger effort from Australia to build regional processing in Southeast Asia for refugees. He wants more public housing to address the “homelessness crisis here in Australia.” The “appalling inadequacy” of the dole should be overcome by boosting the Newstart allowance. And Storer is dismayed by the Turnbull government’s dismissal of the Uluru Statement last year from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders. He supports the statement’s call for constitutional change to give a First Nations voice in parliament, and for a Makarrata commission to oversee truth-telling and agreement-making between governments and Indigenous people. He supports bids to encourage more Indigenous entrepreneurs and businesses.

Storer’s centre-left agenda could well place him somewhere between contemporary Labor and the Australian Greens. But there is another side to his political self that unfolded far from South Australia’s Riverland region.

When he was twenty-three, he left Australia for Hong Kong. He calls the move a “seminal moment in my life.” He was swept up by Asia’s “dynamic mindset embracing change, seeking new horizons for experience and prosperity.” For the next twenty years he worked in China and elsewhere in Asia with small and medium enterprises, then with the World Bank in Vietnam and later selling business enterprises into Asia from Sydney and Adelaide.

He learned Mandarin and Vietnamese, languages of countries he worked in. “It was both respectful and offered insights I could not have otherwise gained,” he says. He wants more Australian companies to invest in Asia, and more Asian investment here: “We must resist knee-jerk reactions against investment by non-Western entities.” And he talks glowingly of trade with Asia that has boosted Australia’s economy, citing a 63 per cent year-on-year rise in wine exports to China in 2017, much of that from his home state.

Yet there are reports that China has imposed entry delays on some Australian wine exports in response to the Turnbull government’s anti–foreign interference legislation, which some see to be aimed at China. How does Storer think the government has handled Australia’s China relationship? He seems unwilling to be drawn into that debate, but without pausing he offers a slightly pointed response, nonetheless: “It’s a complex issue and we have to have measured statements and actions, but also openly engage with China. It will be a defining aspect of our region and worldwide.”

Storer’s wife, Belinda, has Malaysian-Chinese background; they have two sons. Political attention will shift to Storer once again during parliament’s final sitting week before the Super Saturday by-elections in late July. Emboldened by winning Senate support for its $144 billion income tax cut package, the government will reintroduce its plan to cut company taxes from 30 per cent to 25 per cent over the next nine years. And once again, for the company tax cuts, Storer’s vote could be crucial.

He supported the first stage of the income tax cuts, targeting low- and middle-income earners, arguing they were affordable and that their impact would flow directly to the economy. He opposed the last two stages, which will leave most income-earners eventually paying 32.5 per cent tax. He says the full package is unaffordable and will “handcuff” revenue. Australia, he says, is already paying $18 billion a year in interest on $550 billion of gross government debt. But the government insisted on putting all income tax cuts in one package. So while nine of the Senate’s ten crossbenchers gave votes the government needed, Storer joined Labor and the Australian Greens to vote against it.

The company tax cuts are a less sure thing. More crossbenchers still need persuading to get them through. Given his support for more investment and enterprise with Asia, some might see Storer favouring Turnbull’s argument that Australia’s corporate tax rate of 30 per cent is making the country uncompetitive. Asia has an average company tax rate of 21 per cent.

Storer sees it differently. He challenges Turnbull’s case that such cuts will trickle down to benefit workers and thus boost the economy. Parliament has already approved some company tax cuts, but only for businesses with annual turnovers of $50 million or less. Storer cites a survey from one consultancy showing these cuts have produced little of the growth in wages and jobs the government claimed would follow. He thinks the company tax cuts are “too isolated” and should form part of broader tax reform. His model is the tax review undertaken ten years ago by Ken Henry, who was Treasury secretary at the time. Henry produced 138 recommendations, most of which governments have ignored.

The amalgam of market economist and social progressive in Storer is a sign that no government can take his vote for granted. As he embarks on securing a longer term in parliament, why does he see politics as an avenue to achieve change? “My ideas have been well received,” he says. He plans to test all legislation by benchmarks of “integrity, fairness, prosperity and sustainability” before giving it his vote. “That is what South Australians would like me to do, without seeking side benefits.” That is a kind way of saying “no deals.”

Our interview, just days before the income tax legislation goes to parliament, comes to a speedy end. With Parliament House alive with lobbyists and meetings, Jim Middleton, a former senior ABC journalist who now works for Storer, ushers the senator out. In a parliament where deal-making has become the name of the game, Storer the independent will be an interesting figure to watch. ●

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Outwardly, at least, Gupta himself has adopted some of this casual culture. Speaking in his Sydney office, he wears a white shirt, dark blue trousers, a light blue jacket and R.M. Williams riding boots. Since he bought the failed Whyalla steelworks company Arrium out of administration six months ago, his family has moved to Australia. They live in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, where his children attend private schools. “In a short space of time, it has become home,” he says. “We have had a very accepting reception.”

But Gupta’s business trajectory in Australia has been anything but casual. A month after buying the steelworks through his company GFG Alliance, he acquired a majority stake in Zen Energy, an Australian solar energy and battery storage company, then chaired by the economist Ross Garnaut. Through the renamed company, Simec Zen, Gupta plans to cut the steelworks’ energy costs by installing solar and battery technology that will feed into the national energy grid as well. “The energy investment is a key aspect,” he says.

He is also embarking on a pumped-hydro storage project, to be built in a disused pit in the adjacent Middleback Ranges among iron ore mines that came with the steelworks sale. And less than four months after he acquired Zen, he bought from resources company Glencore a mine in New South Wales producing coking coal, another steelmaking ingredient.

“I’ve seen more time lost in political conflict in Australia than in Britain,” says Gupta.

Integration like this is the name of Gupta’s game. He aims to increase the Whyalla steelworks’ output by about a third over the next couple of years, and to integrate sales with those from other steel businesses he has rescued, including in Britain. “It’s a tall order,” he says. “So far, so good. With the right integration with plants outside Australia, it will stack up.”

The pace of Gupta’s operations is almost matched by those of other foreign companies that have flocked to underwrite renewable energy projects in South Australia over the past year. Last March Jay Weatherill, the Labor premier, launched a plan for South Australia to “take charge” of its own energy strategy. His government backed it with $550 million. The trigger was the statewide blackout in September 2016, after a freak storm separated South Australia from the national electricity grid; more blackouts followed in early 2017.

South Australia closed its last coal-fired power station in 2016. Weatherill’s plan encourages investment instead in solar and wind renewable energy sources, a new government-built gas-fired plant and battery storage to stabilise the power system. The plan drew Elon Musk, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, to install the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery outside Jamestown, north of Adelaide, through his company Tesla. It came on stream in December. Neoen, a French renewables company, now owns and runs the battery in conjunction with its adjacent ninety-nine-turbine wind farm.

Tesla is also building a “virtual power plant” in South Australia to link 50,000 homes with solar panels and batteries. Solar Reserve, an American company, is embarking on a solar thermal plant at Port Augusta, which purportedly will produce enough energy by 2020 to meet all the SA government’s own needs. And Neoen is planning a solar and wind-powered plant at Crystal Brook to produce hydrogen energy for export.

Already, almost half of South Australia’s electricity comes from wind and solar power, the rest mainly from gas. This puts South Australia closer to countries like Iceland, Sweden, Norway and New Zealand in its use of renewables than to Australia as a whole. During the current state election campaign, Weatherill announced an even higher renewables target: 75 per cent by 2025. The Turnbull government has attacked his renewables strategy, blaming it for high electricity prices and unreliable supplies.

But Weatherill hopes the strategy will play well when South Australians vote this Saturday. A recent Newspoll showed that Weatherill’s renewables commitment made 32 per cent of people “more likely to vote Labor” and 22 per cent less likely. (Thirty-four per cent said it would not influence their vote.) Steven Marshall, the Liberal opposition leader, wants to scrap the renewables target and spend money on more connections linking South Australia to the eastern states within the National Electricity Market, where coal-fired power still dominates. The impact of the vote for Nick Xenophon’s new party, SA-BEST, is hard to predict; it is standing candidates in thirty-six of forty-seven lower house seats. But, after sixteen years in power, Labor faces a tight contest.

Whyalla could be a testing ground. When I visited the city two years ago Arrium, the company that then owned the steelworks, had recently gone into administration. After producing steel for sixty-nine years, Whyalla was facing an uncertain future. South Australia’s car factories were also shedding jobs as the last of them prepared to close in 2017. It seemed as if the state’s old manufacturing industries were tottering before the forces of globalisation.

Gupta’s investment has restored a sense of confidence in Whyalla, at least. He supports more energy interconnectors to the National Electricity Market (“Without more, South Australia has a limited role”). But he’s also a champion of the state’s renewables strategy. He has made renewable and low-carbon energy a focus of his manufacturing businesses globally.

His plan to build pumped-hydro power for the Whyalla steelworks has even captured federal attention. The Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the federal body that invests in renewables projects, has offered $500,000 for a pre-feasibility study on this one. (After Julia Gillard’s Labor government set up the agency, Tony Abbott as Liberal prime minister tried to abolish it. Malcolm Turnbull, Abbott’s successor, has kept it going with a reduced budget.)

“Renewable energy is a given for Australia,” says Gupta. “It’s only a matter of time. The next generation will expect it. The country has abundant natural resources of wind and sun. It’s where the world is heading. I think South Australia can become a hub of energy-intensive industries. That will encourage, in turn, more investment in renewables industries.”

He is equally certain that coal, Australia’s second-biggest export industry after iron ore, is in decline. “It may have a future, but not in the generation of power,” he says. “We’re past the turning point for coal. China can’t continue to grow the way it’s doing. Eventually it will plateau, and when that happens it won’t need iron ore and coal from Australia.

“That’s the problem I have with Australia’s resource export model. You could argue that twenty-six years without a recession in Australia means it must be doing something right. That works as long as resources are needed. But all countries have to work hard to innovate. A good thing about Australia is that there’s a lot of innovation at the base, in universities. But it often doesn’t get the commercial support it needs.”

That leads Gupta to offer his observations on what he thinks is holding Australia back. The egalitarian shorts-and-coffee culture encourages him: “You need industry and government to work together when you want to make things happen.” But the political caterwauling between federal and state governments, of the type that has plagued energy policy for years, dismays him. “It doesn’t work. A lot of time is lost in these conflicts. I’ve seen more time lost in political conflict in Australia than in Britain.”

Gupta speaks positively about the state that is now the focus of his Australian investments. “South Australia has too often felt like a poor cousin. Yet Adelaide has all the attributes to be a great city: universities, beaches, culture and great properties. If we can solve energy in South Australia, the state can lead in bringing down Australia’s energy costs, which will attract more industries to invest.” His own investments in Whyalla do not stop at steel. He wants to redevelop its waterfront with a fairground, restaurants and an upmarket hotel.

Gupta is pleased to be investing in Australia at a time when we are forging closer ties with the country of his birth. India is now Australia’s biggest source of immigrants, driven partly by a rise in the number of students from India. “Too many economic opportunities between Australia and India have been missed,” he says. “For Australia, China is today, India is tomorrow.” ●

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Bloomberg news reported earlier this month that the WTO’s confidential interim report had rejected a bid backed by tobacco companies to sink Australia’s law. The WTO is due to release its final report later this year, and lawyers in Australia who have been following the case say it is “unheard of” for a WTO outcome to change between interim and final reports. Already, health experts are predicting big changes from the ruling.

As the WTO case against Australia dragged on, it had a chilling effect on other countries. Some that had plans to mandate plain packaging held back. Now, says Rob Cunningham, a senior analyst at the Canadian Cancer Society in Ottawa, the news of the WTO’s verdict has made momentum for global change “unstoppable.” According to Cunningham, “Australia has demonstrated incredible leadership. Australia has done the heavy lifting that will benefit the rest of the world. And now the global dominoes are falling. The result will be reduced addiction, disease, disability and death.”

The momentum started in December 2012, when Australia became the first country to start operating plain packaging. Since then, Britain and France have done likewise, Ireland and Norway are due to do so later this year, and New Zealand and Hungary intend following next year. About ten other countries, including Canada, Romania and Uruguay, have signalled plans for plain packaging.

Even as the Gillard Labor government prepared to pass the enabling legislation in late 2011, other countries and international health outfits were watching Australia closely. And since she left politics four years ago, invitations have kept coming to Roxon to speak on the topic around the world.

She has met government ministers and given talks in South Africa, Norway, Canada, China, Sweden, Denmark and Britain. She has spoken twice at the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use, a campaign funded by American billionaire Michael Bloomberg to cut an estimated six million deaths a year from tobacco smoking, most of them in poorer countries. And in 2011, she addressed a UN General Assembly summit on non-communicable diseases. “The fight against big tobacco is one which, together, we will win,” she told world leaders and health officials.

Six years later, with the WTO decision hovering, Roxon puts the point another way. “The movement to control the tobacco industry has to be a global one as well,” she told me recently. “Otherwise we’re fighting with a hand tied behind our back.”

In her post-political life, Roxon remains engaged with the issue. Among other roles, she is chair of the Cancer Council Australia and an adjunct professor at Victoria University. Hers has not been the only voice carrying Australia’s message: “There could have been ten people from ten different Australian organisations, health experts and NGOs, travelling at any one time talking in different countries,” she says.

These countries are the “friendships” Australia has built. The “common enemy” is big tobacco: “All countries where I and other Australians have spoken want to know the same things: what the tobacco industry did to counter our move, how we mastered the political will and how the battle unfolded here.”

Australia’s plain packaging law went further than any previous regulation, anywhere in the world, designed to turn people off smoking. It required all packets to be the same drab brown colour, brand names to be reduced to the same small font size and graphic pictures to be displayed of smoking’s health impacts, such as lung cancer and gangrene. The global tobacco industry was undoubtedly alarmed by the prospect of bigger countries with higher smoking rates taking up Australia’s regime.

The industry didn’t wait for Australia’s law to start operating before trying to stop it. In 2011, British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco, Japan Tobacco and Philip Morris launched a constitutional challenge to the legislation in the High Court in Canberra. The same year, Philip Morris Asia opened a separate challenge in a Singapore-based tribunal under a bilateral investment treaty between Australia and Hong Kong. Both challenges failed.

Because the WTO oversees international trade rules and settles trade disputes, it will accept challenges only from WTO members, not from corporations. Four countries, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Indonesia, brought cases against Australia. A fifth, Ukraine, initially joined them, but later withdrew. Some tobacco companies have reportedly helped the countries mount the cases, which were all eventually heard together.

The four countries alleged that Australia’s plain packaging law imposed trade barriers and breached intellectual property and trademark rights. Australia argued that the law was designed, in part, to meet its international obligation to help safeguard public health. In its defence of the Hong Kong case, the Australian government said smoking killed 15,000 Australians each year and placed a significant burden on productivity and the healthcare system.

Legal experts believe Australia has a strong case. “Under WTO law, measures that have a protectionist intent are problematic,” says Andrew Mitchell, a professor at Melbourne Law School. “In contrast, Australia’s plain packaging law doesn’t discriminate between countries. It applies to all tobacco products, whether made here or imported into Australia. So it’s a non-discriminatory measure introduced in good faith to protect public health.”

Meanwhile, almost five years after plain packaging started in Australia, evidence indicates that it is working. The Cancer Council Victoria cites the latest National Drug Strategy Household Survey, which shows a drop of 2.6 per cent in the number of daily tobacco smokers in 2013, the year after plain packaging started, compared with three years earlier. (Results of the latest survey are due later this year.)

The federal health department commissioned Tasneem Chipty, an expert in econometric analysis, to crunch data from smoking prevalence surveys. She concluded last year that plain packaging, after almost three years, had resulted in more than 108,000 fewer smokers in Australia. Tobacco companies have challenged such data, claiming higher prices from increased excise taxes (another government anti-smoking measure) caused the falls in smoking. But Chipty says she accounted for “a range of variables, including excise tax increases.”

In a “post-implementation review” of plain packaging last year, the federal health department found the measure had “begun to achieve its public health objectives of reducing smoking and exposure to tobacco smoke in Australia.”

Amid Australia’s toxic federal political scene, where policy progress often proves impossible, plain packaging stands out for having attracted a strong bipartisan consensus. At first, though, there were divisions.

As the Gillard government prepared to introduce legislation in 2011, opposition leader Tony Abbott and his shadow health minister, Peter Dutton, weren’t ruling out abolishing the law in government. Tobacco companies, which had donated big money to the Liberal Party, vigorously opposed the legislation. So did conservative think tanks allied to the party, including the Institute of Public Affairs.

The Coalition eventually voted for the bill. Roxon now gives credit to Coalition governments from 2013 for keeping up legal and financial support to defend Australia’s case at the WTO. “Many new ministers in this government have been surprised to discover how popular Australia has become overseas with this,” she says.

Once the WTO formally announces its decision, lawyers expect the complainants to lodge an appeal. Such a move would fit the tobacco industry’s pattern of trying to delay plain packaging’s spread. Rob Cunningham of the Canadian Cancer Society says that if the WTO ruling survives an appeal, it will have “enormous impact.” For many countries, “WTO agreements are the only potential legal issue regarding plain packaging.”

Regardless of legal outcomes, Australia’s influence has already spread. “Australia’s Nicola Roxon was genuinely impressive in how she pressed forward, despite fierce tobacco industry opposition,” says Cunningham. “She was a model health minister with a historic achievement and deserves tremendous credit. Australia’s plain packaging experience has been cited in parliament after parliament.”

Roxon herself is anxious to share the credit. “It shows we have smart researchers, very professional public servants, recognised non-government organisations and a sceptical media,” she says. “These things make fertile ground for a government to act. All these partners have been part of a soft power diplomacy taking something to the world that works. The international links are now deep and there are lots of channels to talk, which are being used extensively. I’m just a small part of that, because it has taken on a life of its own.” •

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“We’re setting some new foundations,” says Alistair Ferguson, chair of the Bourke Aboriginal Community Working Party. He is talking about “justice reinvestment,” an approach first advocated by the American hedge fund billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, which is having its first serious Australian trial on the banks of the Darling, 760 kilometres northwest of Sydney.

The plan involves channelling money that would have been spent building more prisons into community projects aimed at keeping young Aborigines and other vulnerable groups out of them. About a third of Bourke’s 2500 people are Indigenous, and the town has experienced some of Australia’s worst Aboriginal youth imprisonment rates.

In March 2014, with Ferguson as their leader, a loose consortium including the police, the Bourke Shire Council, business figures and Indigenous leaders embarked on a project to apply what Ferguson calls “this community model” of justice reinvestment to try to bring the imprisonment rate down. They have secured funding, mainly from philanthropists at the Dusseldorp Forum and the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation, for two years.

Ferguson is wary of discussing the program’s workings and achievements so far. But he is confident that next year the Bourke partners will have a case to take to the NSW government for supporting similar schemes elsewhere. “We’ve even got the Bourke liquor accord,” he says. “On Monday, we got the pub licensees to endorse what we’re doing. They’re helping with the problem of young people hanging around, and looking at ways of improving parental responsibility.”

The project could hardly be more timely. It’s twenty-four years since the final report of the royal commission set up by the Hawke government to examine the alarmingly high rate of Aboriginal deaths in police custody and juvenile detention. A recent Amnesty International report, A Brighter Tomorrow, has revealed that, among young Aboriginal people at least, the incarceration rate has doubled since then.

Amnesty’s two-year research project found that Indigenous young people – those aged between ten and seventeen – are now twenty-six times more likely to be in detention than their non-Indigenous peers. Aboriginal people make up about 5 per cent of Australia’s population in this age group, but are almost twelve times that proportion among detainees. On an average night in 2013–14, 430 of the 724 detainees in that age group Australia-wide were Indigenous children.

The picture is even worse for Aboriginal children aged ten and eleven: they make up more than 60 per cent of that group’s detainees. And it is worse still for Indigenous youth as a whole in Western Australia. They are fifty-three times more likely to be locked in detention than non-Indigenous young people – more than twice the national average.

The revelations come as the Abbott government, with Labor’s support, is preparing the ground for a referendum to recognise Indigenous Australians in the constitution. When Tony Abbott led the Coalition to power in 2013, he made much of his commitment to improving life for Indigenous Australians. He promised a “new engagement with Aboriginal people” and to be a “prime minister for Aboriginal affairs.” Yet the Abbott government has responded to the Amnesty report with silence.

It’s not hard to see why. The report takes Australia to task on an issue for which Abbott’s government has already shown contempt: Australia’s failure to comply with international human rights obligations through the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Australia signed up to this, the most widely ratified human rights treaty, twenty-five years ago. The convention stipulates that children should be imprisoned only as a “measure of last resort.”

This is the same convention that Gillian Triggs, president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, cited in The Forgotten Children, the report of the commission’s inquiry into Australia’s practice of locking up for indefinite periods children arriving on boats crammed with asylum seekers.

Triggs, too, cited Australia’s international human rights obligations covering the rights of the child. The Abbott government dismissed the findings out of hand and set about vilifying Triggs. Abbott called the report a “transparent stitch-up” that was politically biased. Asked then if he felt any guilt about the treatment of children in immigration detention, he replied, “None whatsoever.”

Amnesty, at least, has been spared such language. But its report on Australia’s treatment of Indigenous children is quite unsparing. It highlights some of the reasons why incarceration rates are climbing to a level that Mick Gooda, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner at the Human Rights Commission, calls “one of the most challenging human rights issues facing our country today.”

Since 1996, Western Australia has imposed mandatory prison sentences of one year on young people under its so-called “three strikes” law for those convicted of home burglaries. The last publicly available figures, from 2001, show that 81 per cent of the ten- to seventeen-year-olds sentenced under this law were Aboriginal. Amnesty has condemned Western Australia’s refusal to divulge mandatory detention figures since then, “given the human rights implications of these laws.”

Yet the WA government, under premier Colin Barnett, has recently introduced legislation imposing even tougher mandatory sentencing rules for judges and magistrates. Denis Reynolds, president of the Children’s Court of Western Australia, says these changes would only increase numbers in detention, especially among young country Aborigines. In 2013–14, 87 per cent of ten- to thirteen-year-olds in detention in Western Australia were Aboriginal; Amnesty was refused similar figures for children aged ten and eleven.

Queensland violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child in at least two ways. It treats seventeen-year-olds as adults in its criminal justice system, when the convention defines a child as anyone below eighteen. On top of that, the former Liberal National government, under Campbell Newman, changed the state’s Youth Justice Act to free courts from the “detention as a last resort” requirement when sentencing children. After an outcry from human rights groups and the Queensland Law Society, Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Labor government promised to repeal that change after it unseated the Newman government in February; so far, it has not done so.

Meanwhile, Amnesty has called on the federal government to override the Western Australian mandatory sentencing law, and the offending Queensland provisions, in Canberra’s capacity as the government responsible for enforcing Australia’s human rights obligations. It also wants Canberra to raise the age at which children in Australia are held criminally responsible from ten to twelve, the age the UN convention stipulates.

There seems little, if any, chance of such intervention. After a damning UN report on Australia’s asylum policies last March, Abbott declared that Australians were “sick of being lectured to by the United Nations.” Yet pressure from Amnesty and other human rights bodies is only bound to mount unless fresh solutions to the Indigenous incarceration rates are explored. Indeed, former High Court judge Michael Kirby argues that getting imprisonment rates down should take precedence over a referendum on constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians.

Justice reinvestment as a name and idea first surfaced in 2003 in an article by Susan Tucker and Eric Cadora for the Open Society Institute, a think tank founded by George Soros. Attacking what they called “the failures of prison fundamentalism,” the authors argued that the war on drugs, three-strikes sentencing laws, elimination of judicial discretion and parole, and the “broad abandonment of rehabilitation” had produced an unprecedented level of imprisonment in the United States: more than two million then compared with 200,000 in 1972.

Prison inmates were often “people of colour,” convicted for non-violent crimes, poor, undereducated and unemployed. Three-quarters of them were dependent on drugs or alcohol; two-thirds would end up back in prison. Much of this profile would fit many of the young Indigenous Australians thrown into custody, too. The authors contended that chunks of the public money spent on prisons should be redirected to building schools, job training, healthcare, better public spaces and other “human resources.”

Central to their argument is the need to devolve responsibility for all this to the communities where high incarceration rates are worst. The communities could redeploy funds that the state would have spent on prisons and raise their own funds in the process, just as Bourke is doing.

“From an investment perspective, both our prison and parole/probation systems are business failures,” Tucker and Cadora wrote. “The question should be ‘What can be done to strengthen the capacity of high incarceration neighbourhoods to keep their residents out of prison?’ not ‘Where should we send this individual?’.”

The idea sounds logical enough, and some communities in Britain and the United States have since taken it up. More often, though, governments have feared risking populist backlashes should they appear to be less than tough on law and order. During Barry O’Farrell’s period as premier of New South Wales, the state’s Liberal attorney-general, Greg Smith, tried to reform the state’s prison system with an approach reflecting some elements of justice reinvestment. In the face of a relentless campaign by Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, Smith sought to rehabilitate many young offenders instead of locking more of them up. After Mike Baird took over as premier last year, he dumped Smith from cabinet; Smith later quit politics.

Tom Calma, the former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner, was the first to advocate justice reinvestment for Indigenous Australia in his 2009 Social Justice Report. The approaches that had been tried in the two decades since the royal commission, he said, were simply not working: “If it were working, we would be seeing a reduction in Indigenous imprisonment, rather than the 48 per cent increase since 1996.” Calma called for “bold and creative” thinking “outside our safe policy parameters.” He nominated justice reinvestment as an approach that “may hold the key to unlocking Indigenous Australians from the cycle of crime and escalating imprisonment rates.”

Mick Gooda took this up when he succeeded Calma as commissioner the following year. In one of his first speeches, he challenged his audience to “imagine if instead of imprisoning all these people, weakening the community further, some were diverted from prison and the money that would have been spent on locking them up is then put into crime prevention and community building programs.”

Gooda cited results from American states that had tried justice reinvestment: a 72 per cent drop in juvenile incarceration in Oregon, and a halt to the growth of Texas’s prison population after that state reinvested $241 million from prison spending to treatment programs and improved probation and parole services.

By contrast, he said, New South Wales would have to build another prison every two years if its prison population continued to grow at current rates, with running costs alone increasing by $170 million each year.

David Brown, emeritus professor of law at the University of New South Wales, also champions justice reinvestment for its potential to “shift from the increasingly discredited and hugely expensive resort to imprisonment as the default response to social marginality, dysfunction and crime.” Brown says there are 30,000 prisoners in Australia at any one time, more than a quarter of them Indigenous, and this is costing governments $3 billion a year. Even a 10 per cent reduction in the Indigenous reimprisonment rate would save more than $10 million a year, according to the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics.

Long before the term justice reinvestment was coined, the royal commission into black deaths in custody recommended something similar when it called for community-led solutions as a key to keeping young Aborigines out of prison.

But achieving an approach like justice reinvestment needs a bipartisan commitment. Brown points out that in America the idea receives support from conservatives and progressives alike. Moral, religious and fiscal conservatives like it if it stops wasting public money on building more prisons. Many progressives welcome shifting resources to social-democratic approaches that cut crime and increase public safety.

There is little sign of such bipartisanship emerging in Australia. After an inquiry two years ago, the Senate standing committee on legal and constitutional affairs supported justice reinvestment as a “mechanism” worth exploring to cut incarceration rates, especially among Indigenous Australians. It recommended that the federal government take a leading role through the Council of Australian Governments, or COAG, and that Canberra establish a trial of the scheme with the states and territories, with at least one remote Indigenous community included as a site.

The Senate report was presented in June 2013, three months before the Abbott government won power. The government has never responded to it. The Senate committee’s Coalition members probably sealed the report’s fate when they issued a minority report opposing the recommendation for federal leadership on justice reinvestment. They said that the states and territories were responsible for most of Australia’s criminal justice system and all of the prison system: “The cockpit for implementation and reform on JR is the states and territories, not the Commonwealth.”

For Amnesty, this attitude ignores the fact that the federal government, not the states, bears responsibility for addressing human rights issues through Australia’s international legal obligations. In its recommendations to the federal government, Amnesty calls on Canberra to take the lead in implementing a national justice reinvestment approach; the Bourke trial, it suggests, could be a model. Amnesty also wants Canberra to add another target to the Closing the Gap targets on Indigenous life expectancy, infant mortality, health and jobs that COAG has pursued since 2008. Like some lobby groups in Australia, Amnesty wants a new “justice target” to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia on prison incarceration rates.

That will be a long haul. The latest Closing the Gap report listed just two of the seven targets (infant mortality and Year 12 school attainment rates) as being “on track”; for at least one target (employment), the gap had actually widened.

Eddie Cubillo, an Indigenous lawyer and executive officer of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services, or NATSILS, welcomes the Amnesty report. The Abbott government had planned to abolish funding to the peak Indigenous law body from mid 2015, a move that probably would have killed it; the government only reversed the decision after an outcry from Indigenous and human rights lobby groups.

NATSILS had already lobbied federal and state attorneys-general to put justice reinvestment on their agendas. “They’ve said it’s a discussion point,” says Cubillo. Late last year the Productivity Commission also endorsed justice reinvestment as something that “requires testing new approaches.”

Priscilla Collins, chief executive of the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency, a legal aid body, reckons the Amnesty report highlights what organisations such as hers have long argued. “It’s about investing in youth, not locking them up,” she says. “Being tough on crime obviously isn’t working.”

Some aspects of the tough-on-crime approach seem entrenched. Young Indigenous people in remote regions suffer more than most from lack of suitable accommodation, which would enable magistrates to release them on bail. So they are much more likely to be locked up on remand. Over the year to June 2014, young Indigenous people were twenty-three times more likely than non-Indigenous ones to be in unsentenced detention.

Only late last year, the NT government introduced its so-called “paperless arrest” law, allowing police to hold for four hours, without charge, someone who is suspected of committing a minor offence. Legal experts say the law is unprecedented: it leaves police unaccountable. At the least, it seems destined to be weighted against young Indigenous people. It also appears to violate the “measure of last resort” provision on imprisonment under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Collins’s agency has launched a High Court challenge to the law. The Human Rights Law Centre, a non-government organisation involved in the challenge, says the law was used more than 700 times in its first three months, with three-quarters of paperless arrests applied to Indigenous people. Even before the new law came into effect, young Indigenous people comprised 96 per cent of those aged between ten and seventeen in detention in the Northern Territory, according to Amnesty, more than double their proportion of that age group’s population.

Former policeman John Elferink, the NT attorney-general, argued that the new arrest law relieves a “burden on our police officers.” He told the ABC, “Unfortunately paperwork, and excessive amounts of paperwork, do affect our police.” Elferink blamed high rates of Indigenous incarceration on what he called the “lifestyles” of Aboriginal people.

Tony Abbott also talked of Indigenous “lifestyle choices” last March when he supported a decision by Colin Barnett, the WA premier, to close 150 of that state’s 274 remote Indigenous communities. Yet Eddie Cubillo and Priscilla Collins believe moves to close remote traditional communities in Western Australia and the Northern Territory would send more young people to urban fringes, making them more vulnerable to poverty, high crime rates and the justice system’s vagaries.

The rising rate of young Indigenous people in detention almost twenty-five years after the royal commission suggests that policy-makers, for all their good intentions, have failed to respond to what Amnesty calls “this national crisis.” The royal commission was a government response to a domestic outrage. But Amnesty’s report has now exposed the same issue to an international human rights spotlight. The indifferent response so far from Australian governments is chilling.

Julian Cleary, of Amnesty International Australia, says Australia is not unique as a country where people in poverty are more likely than others to end up in jail. But the lingering legacies of poverty and land dispossession for Aboriginal Australians have played big parts in the story. Amnesty’s report highlights misguided government policies, such as mandatory sentencing and bail laws, that have only made things worse.

The population of young Indigenous Australians is growing at a faster rate than that of the country as a whole. This sends a signal that incarceration rates will keep rising, too, unless new ways are tried. As Eddie Cubillo observes, “Aboriginal people seem to be the last to be engaged when it comes to finding new approaches.” That could change if the justice reinvestment venture at Bourke, initiated by Indigenous leaders, lives up to its promise. “We reckon it’s the springboard to overcome legacy issues,” says Alistair Ferguson. •

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CROWDS flocking to Adelaide’s Botanic Park for the recent WOMADelaide festival were treated to an innovation: a talkfest on top of the music. Together with the twenty-six groups playing at the biggest world music festival outside Britain, where Womad started, “The Planet Talks” marked the Adelaide event’s twenty-first birthday. Concertgoers could wander from performances by South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela or Jamaican reggae artist Jimmy Cliff to discussions about food security, climate change and population growth with the likes of Paul Ehrlich, the American population biologist, and Ian Lowe, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

“Debate on these issues has become so uncivilised in Australia,” says Ian Scobie, WOMADelaide’s director. “The advent of minority government has turned political debate into grenade-throwing. This puts it back as a conversation to enrich people’s lives.”

It’s a very Adelaidean perspective. And South Australia seems to be looking for such innovative spirit on a broader front, as it charts another economic watershed. Few states would have watched more closely the Reserve Bank of Australia’s decision on 7 May to cut the benchmark interest rate to 2.75 per cent. Economists saw the move as an effort to bring down the value of the Australian dollar, which had traded above its American counterpart throughout the previous eleven months and for much of the previous two years. The high dollar had made it harder for manufacturers to export goods and compete against cheaper imports; and nowhere has the impact been felt harder than in South Australia, where manufacturing comprises a bigger share of the economy, 10 per cent, than in any other state.

“We’ve borne the brunt of the high dollar,” says Jay Weatherill, South Australia’s Labor premier. Publicly Weatherill is a contrast in style to Mike Rann, whom he succeeded after a party coup in late 2011: less outwardly ebullient, more low-key and reflective. But he faces the same problem: how to recapture the momentum for change and diversification in a state with just 7.3 per cent of Australia’s population, most of whom live in Adelaide.

In his Adelaide office, Weatherill charts how economic diversification has been a recurring challenge for the state under both sides of politics for almost seventy years. After the second world war the Liberal and Country League Premier, Thomas Playford, tried to end South Australia’s dependence on farming by offering manufacturers low costs and big subsidies. Car makers and whitegoods factories followed. The Playford model of sheltered manufacturing lost steam when Australia joined the more competitive international economy from the 1970s. And now it’s moved offshore, especially to China. As the state’s Manufacturing Green Paper put it last year, South Australia has been hit by a double whammy: a combination of the strong dollar and the “rise of low-wage, low-cost manufacturing economies.”

In the 1970s, Labor premier Don Dunstan chose culture to take up where subsidised manufacturing left off. Dunstan promoted Adelaide as a cultural capital, encouraging groundbreaking arts festivals to attract people from the rest of Australia. He presided over the building of the Adelaide Festival Centre, which marks its fortieth anniversary this year. Dunstan’s name is still evoked, long after he put South Australia on the visitors’ map. As Anthony Steel, the centre’s inaugural artistic director, wrote in the Adelaide Review recently, “Adelaide needs a bold vision again. We yearn for the next Don Dunstan to stand up.” Even Weatherill concedes, “It’s time for another Don Dunstan to attract a new wave of ideas, people and industries here.”

Indeed, the economic impact of the so-called “Dunstan decade” is still being felt. An analysis by Barry Burgan, director of Business Development at the University of Adelaide, shows that about 11,500 WOMADelaide patrons last year, about half its total audience, came from interstate, a bigger visitor component than for any of Adelaide’s nine other arts and culture festivals. Of the $15 million that WOMADelaide audiences spent, about $11 million was “created”: money that otherwise would not have been spent in South Australia. “Unlike other festivals, a world music festival like this doesn’t happen elsewhere in Australia,” Burgan says. “That makes its economic profile unique.”

The other festivals also pack an economic punch. The combined “created” spending for three festivals across a fortnight in March last year, the Adelaide Festival, Adelaide Fringe and WOMADelaide, was $50 million. The boost to gross state product from the three festivals, from wages and other economic stimulants, was about $45 million. Burgan says the impact from the recent 2013 festivals perhaps could be bigger. And this financial spinoff brings important long-run benefits. “With its contribution to creativity and innovation, a strong cultural component is critical to an economy built around smart manufacturing,” he says. “It plays an important part in restructuring a manufacturing-dependent economy.”

JUST how important emerged when BHP Billiton, the world’s biggest resources company, deferred plans last year for a $20 billion expansion of its copper, gold and uranium mine at Olympic Dam, in outback South Australia. Big hopes rode on Olympic Dam to help shield the state from the dollar by giving a fresh lease of life to manufacturing linked to the project. In April, further hopes evaporated when Holden, one of Australia’s biggest car makers, cut 500 more jobs, most of them in Adelaide. Mike Devereux, Holden’s managing director, blamed the high dollar. The currency’s appreciation, he said, meant that making things in Australia was almost three-fifths dearer than it was ten years ago. According to the manufacturing green paper, South Australia’s manufactured exports fell almost a fifth in value in three years from their peak in 2007–08. Car-making led the fall: exports crashed in value over three years from $1.5 billion to $290 million. Wine, South Australia’s third-biggest commodity export, also suffered. The value of its exports dropped by 5 per cent in 2011–12. Weatherill skates over the Olympic Dam deferral when asked to assess its impact: “It was the absence of something very positive more than something negative.” Nonetheless, he concedes it was a blow to confidence in South Australia.

The premier sees the future in niche manufacturing outfits like Codan, an Adelaide electronics company. Codan started fifty-four years ago making high-frequency radios for the School of the Air network across the outback. It has evolved into one of the world’s most successful companies making radio systems, metal detectors and mining technology. The rush to mine gold on the back of high gold prices, and the demand for landmine detectors and sophisticated military communications equipment since 11 September 2001, have opened up demand for Codan’s products in Africa, South America Iraq and Afghanistan. The company exports about 90 per cent of its products. “We’re not a household name in Australia,” says Matt Csortan, Codan’s general manager of group operations. “In Africa, we are.”

As well as keeping a relatively low profile, Codan has managed to buck the trend of other manufacturers who are overexposed to the dollar. From its home base in Adelaide, it has turned into a global business, the reverse of the original Playford model of sheltered manufacturers protected by high tariffs. The company employs about 500 people worldwide (more than half of them still in Adelaide), and makes many of its products in Malaysia, where it trades in American dollars. It also manufactures in Canada and Brazil. By doing so, Csortan explains, Codan spreads its currency risk as much as its market risk. “We never sought to go overseas to avoid employing locals,” he says. “The market is just too big to make everything here. You can’t hope to be competitive globally for a company like ours today if you do all your manufacturing in Australia. We like to think that growing the South Australian company globally is just as significant as doing it all here.”

Other hopes shimmer on the horizon for defence and mining, two industries that post-Playford premiers opened up to help the state diversify. The Gillard government’s defence white paper in May named Adelaide as the assembly base for twelve Future Submarines, “the biggest and most complex defence project Australia has ever embarked upon.” Mining companies are scrambling to explore gas from untapped shale deposits in the Cooper Basin. The forecaster BIS Shrapnel says that while South Australia’s economic and population growth rates were lower than Australia’s as a whole over the five years to June 2012, the state economy actually outperformed the national economy in per capita terms. If the dollar keeps falling and a new Dunstan visionary emerges, perhaps it will do even better. •

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ROB OAKESHOTT, one of the independent MPs who have kept Julia Gillard’s minority Labor government in power, is standing on the town hall stage in Wingham, a Manning River farming town on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. It is a Saturday morning in February, yet the town hall is packed with locals who have come to hear Oakeshott and others support their call for a stop to drilling for coal-seam gas, or CSG, an issue looming large in the forthcoming federal election.

Behind Oakeshott sits writer Di Morrissey, the patron of the Manning Alliance, a community action group. Peter Epov, its chair, and Drew Hutton, founder of Lock the Gate, an outfit dedicated to keeping CSG explorers off farms, are also on stage. Epov warms up the crowd by telling them that traditional politics, and parties, have failed them. “We have only three representatives left, and they’re all in this room,” he says. “The first is Rob Oakeshott, the second is Drew Hutton and the third is you, the people, who can stand up and say, ‘We have had enough!’” The audience, responding to his call for a fresh wave of frontier people power, roars its approval.

Wingham offers a snapshot of the changing face of rural politics across eastern Australia. I’ve driven from Sydney to the cattle and former timber town where I spent my childhood to see how the rise of community groups like the Manning Alliance is bringing this about. Wingham Town Hall, a handsome 1920s building, was where I attended the innocent movie matinees of my childhood, when it doubled as the town’s second cinema. At first sight, little seems to have changed in fifty years. A piano on the side of the stage looks as if it has not moved since the days when my parents and their friends attended sedate country balls here. What’s new are the political banners stretching the length of the hall. “Dignity and Respect,” they declare. “No CSG – Keep Our Water Clean in Our Valley.” “Our Land – Our Future.” The women serving tea and scones wear T-shirts saying, “Poison the Manning River? No Fracking Way!”

Wingham lies in the conservative rural heartland of Oakeshott’s federal electorate of Lyne, which stretches from coastal towns like Port Macquarie to the New England and Hunter regions. Before he won the seat five years ago, all of Lyne’s previous MPs had been from the Country or National parties. The humdrum constancy of local affairs once allowed the Nationals to own the Manning; now, the joining together of two old enemies, greenies and farmers, to stop CSG has spun politics into uncharted territory. Oakeshott’s support for the Gillard government has made him unpopular among the region’s diehard conservative voters, but the town hall audience treats him like a rock star. If any Nationals representatives are here today, they’re keeping their heads down.

The Manning Alliance was formed two years ago, after locals discovered that the NSW government had issued CSG exploration licences in the region. At Gloucester, a farming town about sixty kilometres southwest, the energy company AGL plans to drill 110 CSG wells and pipe the gas to Newcastle. With exploration by what has been a largely unregulated industry spreading from suburban Sydney through the Hunter Valley to New England, Manning valley farmers and townsfolk fear they are next. The Gloucester River runs into the Manning. What alarms them most is the potential impact on the rivers of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the method of pumping water, sand and chemicals to extract gas from coal seams. Politicians on both sides, mesmerised by royalty revenues in a gas-poor state, have been silent on this.

Peter Epov, the alliance’s chairman, is a former sports administrator and business consultant. He moved to the valley eight years ago after falling in love with its “pristine” environment and “beautiful” river. He discovered that Di Morrissey, a broadcasting colleague at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, had settled there for similar reasons. Three years ago, Epov and his family learned with shock that their property outside Wingham was included in a new CSG exploration zone.

The alliance cut its teeth on another environmental issue last year when it took on TransGrid. The state-owned power company had planned to build a network of giant electricity pylons across about one hundred kilometres of the Manning valley. Bruce Robertson, a former Sydney economist now living at Burrell Creek outside Wingham, crunched numbers, publicly blowing a hole in a vital part of TransGrid’s case – its claim that electricity demand would soar by a quarter over a decade. Grid Australia, the body representing transmission companies including TransGrid, threatened to sue him last November, then apologised. TransGrid has scaled down and delayed its project. In response to a complaint from the Manning Alliance, the Australian Energy Regulator criticised TransGrid in late February for providing insufficient information on why its proposed mega-line was needed.

As the alliance’s deputy chair, Robertson has turned his attention to CSG. He predicts at least 5000 wells will be drilled between the Manning valley and the Queensland border in ten years if governments keep handing out licences at the same rate.

In Epov and Drew Hutton, the Wingham rally has articulate speakers with finely tuned presentation skills that leave most politicians for dead. Hutton’s perspective is Queensland, where CSG has moved beyond mere exploration to production on an industrial scale. He calls CSG “the biggest threat to the Australian landscape since the expansion of the pastoral frontier.” Epov says mining once created jobs for Australians. “Now it’s creating chaos for local communities.”

This is the key puzzle for politicians. Unlike most mining booms, this one involves ground where millions of voters live, and governments seem to be feeling their sting. The Gillard government is tapping into public anger over CSG as a federal election issue. In late January, the prime minister wrote to Rob Oakeshott inviting the Manning Alliance to meet with her climate change and environment adviser. A fortnight after the Wingham town hall meeting, Barry O’Farrell, the NSW Liberal premier, finally blinked: he announced a two-kilometre exclusion zone for CSG exploration around towns and suburbs (but not farms). Even so, it seems likely that governments’ fights with groups such as the Manning Alliance have only just begun. •

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When Sydney’s southwest suburbs suffered a wave of drive-by shootings early this year, the city’s tabloid press and notorious radio shock jocks went into overdrive. Their target was Greg Smith, who is about to complete his first year as attorney-general in Barry O’Farrell’s state government. In most respects, Smith is a classic conservative Liberal: a barrister, and former public prosecutor, who represents the leafy electorate of Epping. His Sydney north shore constituency is a world away from the streets on the other side of town where rival gangs of young men shot up each other’s homes in an intimidating display of turf warfare.

In one regard, though, Smith is something of a radical. After sixteen years of state Labor governments, he came to power promising to reform the state’s prison system. Instead of locking more people up, Smith has pledged to find formulas to allow many minor offenders and young criminals to be rehabilitated and then let go.

Sydney’s Daily Telegraph has waged an unrelenting campaign against Smith. It calls him “Marshmallow Smith,” and accuses him of going “soft on crime.” In one extraordinary front page splash in early February, the paper claimed: “Exclusive: Gays, Minorities Get Bail but the Rest… Go Straight to Jail.” The piece claimed to be based on a draft report by the NSW Law Reform Commission, which Smith had not seen. Media hype of this sort threatens to unsettle the government, in a political climate in which law-and-order auctions are the name of the game: both sides compete in proving to voters that they are the toughest on crime.

Smith claims to be unmoved. “The whole hardline approach against crime has been a failure in many places,” he tells me. “This attempt to make me look softer misrepresents what I am trying to do. I am trying to turn people away from crime. It’s not soft, it’s being more pragmatic.”

The challenge Smith faces in testing his pragmatic approach is daunting. Australia spends $11.5 billion a year on law and order, about $511 a year per person. The dubious honour for the biggest spending goes to New South Wales. In evidence late last year to a parliamentary estimates committee, and in a speech to a solicitors’ conference in Sydney, Smith painted a chilling picture.

Within two years of their release, 43 per cent of NSW prisoners reoffend, compared with just under 37 per cent in Victoria, for example, and less than 30 per cent in Tasmania. (The Australian Capital Territory will start reporting on recidivism from 2011–12.) This high recidivism rate accompanies another grim profile: of 15,000 people taken into custody in New South Wales in 2007–08, almost two-thirds were affected by drugs or alcohol when they committed their most serious offences.

Smith’s state also has the highest number of prisoners on remand in Australia. Over the ten years to October 2011, the number of adults held on remand rose by 86 per cent. More worryingly, more than four-fifths of the juveniles held on remand were eventually set free with non-custodial sentences. Locking these young people up, when their crimes are finally found not to deserve such punishment, simply creates more problems, says Smith: “They spend a long time being exposed to a university of crime among prisoners.”

The seeds of Smith’s liberal zeal to change all this go back to his days as a prosecutor, first as an instructing solicitor then as a crown prosecutor. He would respond with scepticism to the hard luck stories defence counsel wheeled out about their clients’ disadvantaged upbringings. Slowly, though, he realised that most people who commit crimes do so precisely because of their backgrounds, including dysfunctional family life and poor education opportunities.

At the same time, the law-and-order auction among politicians had corrupted the state’s judicial system. The chief cause were amendments to the Bail Act by successive governments – seventeen amendments in the legislation’s thirty-four years of operation – which made it harder for magistrates and judges to grant bail. One change under Labor in 2007 had a big impact on juveniles. The year before the amendment, about 3600 minors were admitted to remand; the year after the change, there were almost 5100.

This was a classic case, says Smith, of “the rush to appease a fearful public.” And the sense that it wasn’t working triggered his decision to go into politics and try to change it. “Being a legal practitioner, I could see that things were getting tougher,” Smith says. “It was harder for judges to comply with all the changes in legislation. The law-and-order auctions in elections over the past twenty years had skewed the judicial system. Sentencing had become much more complex. Errors were happening much more often. It was becoming harder for judges and magistrates to get it right. As a politician, I saw great difficulty in the higher recidivism rates in New South Wales than in Victoria and other states. When you look around the world, law-and-order auctions are all about being tough on crime. But they’re not cutting crime.”

Put another way, the crime picture in New South Wales presents a strange paradox. Over the past twelve years the rates of some forms of crime, including robbery, car theft and muggings, have actually fallen. Yet incarceration rates have risen. Don Weatherburn, director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, says the fall in such crimes reflects a drop in heroin consumption since 2000, and a robust economy with lower unemployment rates and rising real wages. A bureau study released on 13 March found that a 10 per cent increase in household income could produce a 19 per cent drop in property crime over the long term and a 14.6 per cent fall in violent crime.

Weatherburn laments that rising imprisonment rates have gone hand-in-hand with this trend. Another bureau study found that the proportion of defendants refused bail in NSW criminal courts doubled between 1993 and 2007. Instead of pouring money into rehabilitating criminals, governments had taken the safer option of imposing tougher penalties: “They lost faith in rehabilitation. There were no votes in it.”

Appearing with Weatherburn on the ABC Radio National program The National Interest three years ago, Smith pledged that if the Liberals won the 2011 NSW election, they would change that: “We will take a more moderate approach, not ignore protecting the community from serious offenders, but doing more to help the less serious offenders who have been locked up sometimes for much longer than they should, and losing their chance to be rehabilitated.”

Has Smith now found the reality of power a stumbling block to putting his promises into action? If so, he is not saying. But in his first year as attorney-general and justice minister, he has embarked on a dazzling array of initiatives that may at least set the stage for change. He has commissioned a report into bail laws from Hal Sperling, a former Supreme Court judge, due very soon. One of its terms of reference involves how bail is used for young people and Indigenous people. As Weatherburn told the ABC program, attempts to cut Aboriginal imprisonment rates have failed completely. Such rates are now depressingly higher than they were higher than they were when the Hawke government set up the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in the 1980s.

Smith says there will “certainly” be new bail laws after he has digested Sperling’s report. Precisely what, he is not revealing. But he does want an end to what he sees as discrimination against young people in the system now: “I’d like to see a return to bail as something primarily intended to make a prisoner turn up to court and not intimidate witnesses, rather than being used as another form of imprisonment, as it is now.”

He has commissioned a second report from James Wood, another former judge, into what he calls the “ridiculous complexity” of the state’s sentencing laws. The increased incarceration rates are due mainly to tougher sentencing regimes that governments have imposed, with standard non-parole periods and longer average sentences – all part of the law-and-order auction.

And there has just been a separate review into prison job structures by Keith Hamburger, a former director-general of Corrective Services in Queensland. As a result, Smith says, there are plans to cut head office job numbers in Corrective Services NSW, and to devolve more power to the regions where prisons are located.

Smith has also ordered the closure of three prisons, at Berrima, Parramatta and Kirkconnell, leaving the state with thirty prisons. He has shed 354 jobs through voluntary redundancies. And he has cut $50 million in spending to make inroads into the $113 million that the corrective services department had run over budget last financial year.

Along with stripping down an inefficient prison structure, Smith wants to cut some of the crudeness from a culture inside prisons that works against prisoners’ chances of rehabilitation. Over ten years, he says, the rate of prisoners educating themselves by taking TAFE or other courses has halved to 30 per cent. Many prisons have lockdown times, when inmates are sent back to cells, starting at 2.30 pm: hardly conducive to study.

Even less conducive is the high rate of drug addiction among prisoners. About 4500 inmates now need daily intervention for drug and alcohol problems. Many are treated with methadone, which may quieten them down but does nothing to cure them. Smith has overseen the opening of the state’s first drug treatment unit inside a prison, at the John Morony complex at Windsor, near Sydney. Eventually, he hopes up to 600 prisoners could be released each year with their drug problems solved: “That will have an effect on their chances of reoffending.”

In late March Smith and Mike Baird, the NSW treasurer, announced a pilot scheme for a government bond in which private investors put up money to fight recidivism. Two community organisations, Social Finance and Mission Australia, will develop the pilot scheme to help 500 repeat offenders released from Junee and Parklea prisons. Smith says his aim in all this is quite simple: he wants to cut the NSW recidivism rate by 10 per cent over the next five years, and to get it below the national average in ten years. “There is no point in building prisons just to house the people who keep reoffending.”

It seems a logical enough argument. And cutting a bloated, inefficient prison bureaucracy is the sort of move one could expect to win points with a cynical NSW electorate. But political landscapes are littered with examples of governments buckling under “soft on crime” attacks like those the tabloids and shock jocks have heaped upon Smith. Nine months ago another conservative leader, David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, intervened to overrule liberal sentencing laws planned by Kenneth Clarke, the justice secretary. “My mission is to make sure families can feel safe in their homes,” Cameron loftily declared. “The first duty of government is to protect people.”

It was a classic line from the law-and-order auction songbook. Can Smith resist similar pressures that police and a populist media will put on his plans in the state with Australia’s most tumultuous and colourful history of law-and-order controversies?

Oddly enough, Smith’s reply echoes David Cameron’s line. “I want the community to be a safer place to live in,” he says. Then he turns the argument around by citing laws giving police greater powers that the O’Farrell government introduced in the wake of the drive-by shooting spree. The new laws have tightened the provisions about consorting and criminal gangs in ways that have alarmed civil liberties and prisoners’ rights advocates. The changes went through parliament unamended in March. “These are not soft,” says Smith. “They are tough laws, and I am behind them.”

Yet Smith deserves credit for at least seeking a new approach to a system that has kept too many young, Indigenous and minor offenders on a treadmill of incarceration, with little hope of more productive lives. “I have a big challenge ahead,” he says.

“I haven’t changed my views on violent crime. The community has to be protected from it. But if my statements that we’re not going to take part in a law-and-order auction make me a radical, so be it.” •

The post Ending Sydney’s law-and-order auction appeared first on Inside Story.

THE revolutions in music and lifestyle were well advanced by August 1970 when another freedom movement opened up. At the height of that New York summer, 25,000 women marched down Fifth Avenue to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the day women won the right to vote. For many, this event symbolised the start of the women’s liberation movement. Lillian Roxon filed a report on the march for the Sydney Morning Herald, which turned into something of a landmark piece itself.

The Herald splashed her story on the front page on 28 August with a picture of the marching women beneath the headline “There Is a Tide in the Affairs of Women,” followed by the dateline “New York, Thursday: Lillian Roxon cables a biased report.” She opened her story: “This is the hardest piece I have ever had to write in my life. I am supposed to be telling what happened when 25,000 women marched down Fifth Avenue last night on the 50th anniversary of the day women won the right to vote. As is customary in my business I am supposed to be telling it briskly and factually and without bias. Fat chance. I’m so biased I can hardly think straight. My emotions are all in a turmoil and I don’t know where to start.”

For the Herald at the time, this was an unconventional, almost rebellious, way of treating a front-page news story. The paper’s management, under the chairmanship of Sir Warwick Fairfax, was conservative on two of the biggest issues of the day, the emerging voices of feminism and the rising tide of opposition to the Vietnam War. It was particularly strict about keeping news stories free from reporters’ interpretations. Something of an undeclared war was being waged between news executives on the fifth floor and management on the fourteenth floor over the paper’s treatment of the women’s movement. Sir Warwick, who had access to all correspondence from the news editor’s office, once rebuked a news executive for having addressed a letter to a reader as Ms. The honorific Ms was not Herald style, the chairman pointed out. The executive argued that, because the woman had signed her own name as Ms, he felt it was only courteous to reply in kind. To which Sir Warwick responded, “It was most discourteous of her to write to us and sign it that way.”

So when Lillian’s story landed off the teleprinter, Alan Dobbyn, standing in for David Bowman as news editor, decided to take a risk. “There was a conjunction of things,” Dobbyn says. “There was Lillian’s excellent report, there was a splendid picture and there was Doug Verity, who was an assistant to the news editor. Verity was greatly taken by the picture. He said, ‘I know the heading: There is a Tide in the Affairs of Women.’ All of these things came together to encourage us to do something adventurous. It was a bit out of character for the Herald at that time. But no thunderbolts descended on us. I thought it was a very effective front page.”

When she saw it in New York, Lillian wrote her appreciation to Dobbyn, her former bureau chief there:

Not a minute too soon to thank you for whatever you had to do to get my women’s lib story on page one. It was really something. And I felt I simply had to counter the stand the blokes took here, especially Lea [Fitzgerald, the Australian Financial Review correspondent] who is very uneasy about it all. I don’t know why they feel so threatened. As someone said recently, the only reason men don’t want to see women free is because they’re not free themselves. Come to think of it who said that was the big G, Germaine Greer in London, who has just written a book called The Female Eunuch with lots of four letter words. She is seven feet tall and a bully and about the only female I know who is NOT a eunuch. Good looking but. She dedicated the book to me and my cockroaches which I thought was kind of her. (Four other girls got a mention in what I thought was the all time weird dedication.)

The story behind this dedication began in late 1968 when Germaine Greer visited New York, a visit that tested the feisty friendship between these two formidable women. Germaine returned to London and wrote her great work The Female Eunuch – first published in October 1970 and never out of print since – which became the bible of feminism for a whole generation of women. It began with the following dedication:

This book is dedicated to LILLIAN, who lives with nobody but a colony of New York roaches, whose energy has never failed despite her anxieties and her asthma and her overweight, who is always interested in everybody, often angry, sometimes bitchy, but always involved. Lillian the abundant, the golden, the eloquent, the well and badly loved; Lillian the beautiful who thinks she is ugly, Lillian the indefatigable who thinks she is always tired.

Shorter dedications to four other women followed. But none struck as many sparks as the one to Lillian. She always believed the cockroach image was a putdown that overwhelmed whatever else Germaine wrote about her. There was something very Australian about the double-edged friendship of these two strong women who had come out of the same proving ground, the Sydney Push. As independent women who had broken free of a heavily male culture, they often seemed to others to be competitors more than compatriots. Germaine had her own connections in the British rock scene. And Lillian had already lived the life of a liberated women well before Germaine came along with her book on women’s liberation.

The first Lillian heard of the dedication in The Female Eunuch was when Tony Delano, an Australian journalist working for the Sunday Mirror in London, rang to tell her about it. “He thought it was lovely. I thought it was simply horrible.” Delano says, “I think Germaine probably made the dedication in commemoration of their times together in New York. It seemed to me that Germaine and Lillian did get on then. Germaine hadn’t been to New York before. She relied on Lillian then: she chose Lillian as her guide to New York.”

Germaine had come a long way since she had arrived in Sydney from her home town of Melbourne in 1959, the year Lillian left for New York. Armed with a first-class Master of Arts degree in English from Sydney University and a Commonwealth scholarship, she left for Cambridge University in 1964, where she took her PhD three years later. By 1968 she was teaching at the University of Warwick. That year, too, saw her marriage to Paul du Feu, a hunky London construction worker with a degree in literature. It lasted three weekends. Du Feu later told Coronet, an American women’s magazine, that Germaine’s “favoured method of conversation was to run both sides of the dialogue,” while Germaine herself was quoted by the New York Times saying that du Feu had tried to “conquer” her in the “crudest form of colonisation.” While at Warwick, Germaine also started appearing on Nice Time, a Granada Television program on which she grooved and jousted with rock stars, using the show as a launching pad for her later media stardom.

By the end of 1968 Germaine was finally ready, as she put it, to confront the New York scene. Up to then Lillian and Germaine appear to have met only in passing through mutual Push friends. Lillian first glimpsed her in Melbourne in 1959 when Germaine was working as a waitress while completing her English–French honours degree. The sighting was in the coffee shop where Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins, Ava Gardner and others from On the Beach (then filming in Melbourne) hung out: “She had purple hair and was the first person in my life I had ever seen wear red stockings.” Germaine later spoke of this period to Clyde Packer, the Australian media figure: “I was a waitress lots of times, but the best time was when Goldy [Brian Goldsmith] opened a restaurant in Toorak Road. By that time, I knew a lot of people in television and the media and I ran the backroom for him where all the television people used to come after hours…” Germaine told Packer: “I believe in kicking ass and taking names, talking loud and drawing a crowd.”

It was Christmas 1968 when Germaine landed in New York, preparing to call on their common Push background to stay with Lillian. She was not yet rich or famous. Lillian was already a star in the New York rock and underground scene centred on Max’s Kansas City; if Germaine had designs on drawing a crowd there, Lillian was well placed to introduce her. The two women were a study in physical contrasts. Lillian was thirty-six, short, round, still a beauty with blonde, shoulder-length hair, but starting to suffer from the asthma that would eventually kill her. Germaine was twenty-nine, tall, slender, striking, with dark hair. Lillian later described Germaine’s arrival in New York dressed like a counter-culture queen in “her embroidered satin antique jacket from the Chelsea Antique Market, her Bessarabian Princess’s Defloration robe, a black net and silver belly dancer’s vest and see-through chiffon velvet elephant pants.”

What happened next did not conform to Germaine’s expectations and appears to have endangered their friendship from the start. Lillian was writing the Rock Encyclopedia and fighting to meet her publisher’s deadline. In these pre-computer days the book and its rising tide of research papers had swamped her small apartment on East 21st Street. She told Germaine she was in no position to put her up and had booked her instead into the Broadway Central Hotel, a budget hotel which, she believed, matched Germaine’s financial circumstances. The Broadway Central had been one of nineteenth-century New York’s grand hotels, known then as the Grand Central. By the late 1960s it had gone very far downhill. Lillian later wrote about this episode; but Germaine had never discussed it until, thirty years later, I approached her for the story behind the dedication to Lillian. She wrote back:

My difficulty is that I did not know Lillian Roxon very well. By the time I came to Sydney she was in New York. I went to New York in 1968 thinking to stay with her but she would not let me. Instead she put me in the Broadway Central, a welfare hotel where people screamed and ran up and down stairs all night, from which I escaped the next day. I probably spent in all no more than five or six hours of quality time with Lillian after The Female Eunuch came out; of course she made it seem rather more.

I admired her but she disliked me and did not bother to hide it. We could talk, I dare say, but I doubt if it’s worth the trouble to you.

Germaine’s letter raised more questions than it answered. Why had she dedicated one of the most influential books of the twentieth century to a woman who disliked her and had dumped her in a cheap hotel full of mad people? Was there more to it than this? If they had spent a mere six hours of quality time together after The Female Eunuch, what about before? Was Germaine simply showing her unpredictable side with this reply? Despite her apparent dismissal of Lillian, her last line left a door ajar.

SHE stood just inside the open door to her study at Newnham College, Cambridge, a tall figure in a long, billowing dress, the sunlight from the window at the other end of the room shining through her greying hair. At fifty-eight Germaine Greer had lost nothing of her commanding presence. She had six other substantial books under her belt now, but none as big a publishing phenomenon as The Female Eunuch. She looked up from an open book in her hands, glanced at me quizzically over the top of her spectacles and invited me to sit on one of her generous sofas, apologising for the way her students had tousled them. We chatted about the Cambridge gardens, then I asked her to delve back thirty years into the past to her first meeting with Lillian Roxon. “I didn’t have any money in 1968,” she began.

Teaching at Warwick University I had a minute salary which barely paid to keep a roof over my head. But I was equipped with the Push addresses for people abroad. So it seemed the most natural thing in the world that, when I went to New York, I would look up Lillian. It was because of the way the Push did things it never occurred to me that I couldn’t just doss on Lillian’s floor. Enough people had dossed on my floor. We had the impression we knew each other because we knew so much about each other. Usually, contact between Australians abroad is very easy. People are very understanding and we all understand the way we’re reacting to things because we all react in a predictable way.

And Lillian was a Libertarian, which was a plus and should have brought us closer together. But a lot of Libertarians will tell you that she really wasn’t, that she really wanted to be mated and monogamous and have some kind of normal Jewish girl’s life. That was always there somewhere. I arrived and she lived in a very over-heated flat opposite the police station. I was perfectly prepared to sleep on her floor and clean her flat and do all that stuff and sort her out a bit, but she didn’t want that – at all. She just did not want me there.

The Broadway Central Hotel was located near Broadway and 3rd Street, about eighteen blocks south of Lillian’s place. When Germaine arrived there during the day to check in, she was told her room would not be ready before midnight. “As I stood there all kinds of human flotsam and jetsam were creeping up to the desk, junkies and madmen. It wasn’t that I was afraid. I was vulnerable. I just didn’t know the score. It was like dropping someone into a snake pit.” Germaine had academic friends to contact and went that evening to a party on Riverside Drive, near Columbia University. She met Andrew Sinclair, the English novelist and historian, who came to her aid.

He decided it was a coup de foudre, in his English-French, and that he wasn’t going to let me out of his sight ever again. He forgot about this within twenty-four hours, but just right then it was a coup de foudre. He said to me, “Where are you staying?” I said “the Broadway Central.” He said, “What?” I said, “Well, my friend Lillian Roxon has booked me in and I really should go there because she’s gone to the trouble.” He said, “Well, I’m coming with you. You’re not going there by yourself.” So off I went with Andrew Sinclair to the Broadway Central. We couldn’t go up in the lift to my room because there was someone being brought down who wasn’t in a very fit state. The door opened and this person was pushed out in a wheelchair death rattling, with a cigarette stuffed in his face to make him look well.

Andrew said, “No – come on!” I said, “No, no.” So we went upstairs and a drag queen, grotesquely made up with lipstick and five o’clock shadow everywhere, in a dress made of an Indian bedspread, came running down the stairs saying [mocking loud, distraught New York accent], “Oh my God, the police are after me. I didn’t pay my cab fare.” I said, “How much is your cab fare?” [Loud, distraught:] “Ninety-five dollars.” I said, “Where the fuck did you come from, Mexico City?” The police come thundering down after this guy. He runs screaming into the lobby in his platform soles. And we find my room, a corridor which had been partitioned off and the door didn’t shut. But I still slept there. But, of course, I didn’t sleep there again. And I never understood why Lillian did that. Was she trying to teach me that life is real, life is earnest or something? Did my sort of convent girl thing annoy her or what? But she was Margaret [Fink]’s great, great friend and I just had to persevere and try to get her to like me. So I didn’t say anything about the Broadway Central. I just moved out.

Next day Germaine moved to the apartment of other friends at 110th Street on the edge of Harlem, a long way from Lillian on 21st Street and the epicentre of New York’s counterculture at Max’s Kansas City. Andrew Sinclair recalls meeting Germaine at the Algonquin Hotel before the Broadway Central drama unfolded:

I met Germaine at the Algonquin, I think, at some literary party. She was terrified at returning to the Broadway Central Hotel. I offered her a couch at my New York publisher’s. Bold girl, she elected to go back to her hotel. “Not without me,” I said, tho’ both of us were penniless. You must understand, I had always treated her as a Victorian lady, which she liked, and she had considered me as an “intellectual lumberjack,” her terms.

Arriving by underground, we found two members of the NYPD wheeling out a stiff on a wheelchair. “How do you know he is a stiff?” Germaine said. “Because they can’t light the cigarette in his mouth.” Going upstairs to G. G.’s hotel room, we encounter a young drag queen, mascara running from his eyes. “Give me twenty bucks,” he says, “or they’ll bust me.” I take out my last two dollars and give it to him. “Best I can do,” I say. He puts lipstick on my hand. At Germaine’s cubby hole, I show her how to jam a chair and wardrobe behind her door handle to deter intruders. We do not even kiss good-night, but we have continued to respect each other mightily – she’s a fine woman.

Lillian’s account of the visit appeared in Woman’s Day in May 1971, soon after The Female Eunuch hit the international bestseller lists. The Australian magazine hoped to capitalise on their New York correspondent’s being the dedicatee of this sensational book and asked Lillian to write about Germaine. In her article Lillian wrote:

Just before she got the idea of writing The Female Eunuch Germaine, who had been living in England, came over to New York for a holiday. She had an open invitation to stay with me but, as luck would have it, she couldn’t have chosen a worse time.

I had just finished covering a presidential election, I was in the process of finishing my Rock Encyclopedia, I had just developed asthma and I had put on, in a matter of a few months, 30lb [13kg] I could definitely live without. My home was covered with newspapers and pages of my manuscript, New York was in the throes of a cockroach plague, I was exhausted and bad-tempered and definitely NOT in the mood to entertain anyone, let alone a lady larger than life and twice as clever.

I told her I was awfully sorry but I just had to be left to cope with my troubles alone. She said, without a trace of compassion, that it was all in my mind, and the love of a good man would solve everything, her usual solution, but that’s small comfort when your breath comes whistling out like a tea kettle and your publisher wants your manuscript fast.

So I moved her into the only hotel she said she could afford. When I rang to ask how she liked it, she said in her best Cambridge Debating Society voice, “Listen, I don’t mind the junkies. I don’t mind the transvestites. I don’t even mind the prostitutes. But I do object to riding down in a lift with corpses.” I hadn’t known that this particular hotel had the highest homicide rate in the world.

In its nineteenth-century heyday, the Broadway Central was the scene of an infamous assassination when Jim Fisk, a rogue tycoon, was shot dead on its staircase by an erstwhile business partner in 1872. Some things, it seemed, had not changed.

Despite this troubled start, Lillian and Germaine did get together during Germaine’s visit. In Germaine’s recollection their connection was clouded by Lillian’s preoccupations with work and her asthma:

There was a lot of stuff going on and I think that was one of the things that annoyed her. I’d go and see her and she’d be doing her thing: “I’m really very busy, I’ve got to work.” And I’d hear her on the phone becoming agitated. She’d be asking for a press pass or something and they’d be stonewalling her, and I could hear her hyperventilating. I could hear the asthma attack coming on. And all I could think was, “I mustn’t play this asthma game because if you reward this phenomenon she’ll do it more.” And I could see it was killing her. She was short of breath, her heart was labouring, probably, already. I never knew how much she ate, and that might be one reason why she didn’t want me there. Because I would have stopped her eating.

She interpreted my behaviour – which was to keep very calm when she was having an asthma attack, and to try to distract her – because I could see her working on it: “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” And I’m an asthmatic myself. She lived in this terribly dry environment. That flat was a tinder-box. I couldn’t breathe in it. So I would try to be very cool with her. “Come on, let’s go and get something to eat, let’s go for a walk, let’s get out of this apartment, let’s get into some moist air.” And she would think I was just being a cow, that I wasn’t responding to her misery. I was her junior by miles, you know, in every way. She was a seasoned old hand and I was this convent school girl. So I tried that and it didn’t work. She would get very, very angry with me and that would make the situation worse. So I couldn’t intervene. But I tried.

Germaine was hardly an innocent convent school girl. Her account reveals little sympathy for Lillian’s need for solitude as a writer up against a publishing deadline, something Germaine, as a brilliant academic, with three degrees to her name, must have understood. She never mentions the Rock Encyclopedia’s central role in Lillian’s life at this time. Did she consider it unworthy? Or, at a time when Germaine had her own standing in the rock-and-roll community in Britain, was Lillian’s forthcoming book a source of competitive friction between the two women?

Lillian’s New York friends remember Germaine’s visit through a somewhat different prism. They remember Lillian taking Germaine to Max’s Kansas City and introducing her to the rock, art and Warhol crowd there. Donald Lyons, the academic and Beach Boys essayist for the Rock Encyclopedia, recalls having a spirited fight with Germaine at Max’s one night over their differing interpretations of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Danny Goldberg remembers Lillian championing Germaine in the way she hyped other Australian visitors to her New York circle. But there was something ineluctably different about Germaine: none of the others ended up on the cover of Life magazine as Germaine would two years later. “It seemed to me that Lillian devoted [herself] full-time to publicising Germaine,” says Goldberg.

They were together all the time before The Female Eunuch. In New York, they were inseparable for many, many weeks. Lillian was constantly having lunch with this one with Germaine or breakfast with that one with Germaine and taking Germaine to Max’s or Germaine to this or Germaine to that. There is no way you could have paid anyone to do the PR that Lillian did out of her heart and out of her belief in her friend. I was there for that. I’m sure Germaine had other allies and had something to say that the world wanted to hear. But there is no question that Lillian was an extraordinary champion before most people in the US knew who Germaine was. Every day it was Germaine this and Germaine that. I believe later they had terrible fights.

One fight led to a severing of their relationship for more than a year. It happened one night in the back room at Max’s Kansas City, although its origin and nature are unclear. Germaine gives a graphic account of it:

I came in and joined a party that Lillian was already in and she just ripped into me. She abused me up hill and down dale – everything about me. My face, my hands, my feet, my voice, my mind, my past, my future, my everything. The New Yorkers were just sort of sitting there as if this was some sort of mud-wrestling contest and I was made to respond in kind. But there was no way I was going to do that. And besides, Lillian was too vulnerable. So I just sort of sat there with tears running down my face thinking, “Why are you doing this? What have I done?” It was as if there was no need for it to be justified: “I feel like giving you a pistol-whipping with my tongue and I’m doin’ it and I’m doin’ it good.” And I just couldn’t believe the brutality of it. So I left.

It must have been one of the few times in her life when Germaine failed to respond to a verbal pistol-whipping, if that is what it was. How could a woman of her strength and verbal skills have remained so uncharacteristically passive? The survivors from that time at Max’s have little recollection of this sensational incident, possibly because so many sensational things happened every night at Max’s in 1968 and 1969. But happen it did, and it was possibly the culmination of an inner competitive tension between the two women that found its outlet in a public display.

Lillian was proprietorial about New York and enjoyed taking charge of visitors. Much as she might have needed Lillian to introduce her to the city’s late sixties underground life, Germaine was not a person to be taken charge of. Germaine says: “I think what Lillian wanted, if she wanted to have anything to do with me at all, was to sort of be my agent in New York, that I would do what she said and I would meet the people she said. And she had a very odd way of doing that. She would say things like, ‘Here is Germaine Greer, Miss Dover Heights 1956.’ Gee, thanks.” (Dover Heights was then on the edge of Sydney’s most exclusive suburbs.)

It was almost as if the two women had too much in common: independence, drive, energy and an Australian background combined with a desire for stardom on a wider stage. New cultural frontiers were being explored and both of them wanted to lead the way. Their competitive edge was often apparent. Marion Hallwood, a Sydney friend then at Columbia University, says: “Lillian would sometimes express political opinions. Lillian was having lots of direct encounters with politicians around that time, with the Nixon presidential campaign. She knew lots of details. But because Germaine had access to academics in New York she would score points. Germaine would say, ‘Oh that’s just gossip. All you know is gossip, Lillian.’ That was one of her put down phrases.” Writer Jim Fouratt says: “Lillian and Germaine had in common the fact that they gravitated towards intelligence. In some ways Lillian then was more successful than Germaine. Lillian Roxon was probably the warmest and nicest cultural mover and groover in New York at that time. It might have been because she was Australian: Australians are very direct and very kind. She didn’t play games of the sort that occurred around the Warhol Factory. A lot of that was drug-induced. But Lillian always remembered what she’d said. Then there was a falling out between her and Germaine. There seems to be something about Australians criticising their own.”

Germaine Greer returned to Britain in early 1969, ready to embark on the book that would make her famous. •

The post Lillian and Germaine in New York appeared first on Inside Story.

I MEET Chuck Hayward at the Jug Shop, a large wine store in San Francisco’s Russian Hill district. Chuck is its wine buyer, and a defender of Australian wine against the hullabaloo of criticism it has been taking in the international press. Three days earlier, on 4 July, the New York Times led its business section with a story describing the Australian wine industry in crisis, under the heading “For Australian Winemakers, More Turns Out to Be Less.” The same piece had appeared a week earlier in the International Herald Tribune, widely circulated in Europe and Asia.

Here in California, home to 12 per cent of America’s population, Australia’s wine reputation is not the only thing in crisis. The entire state, the birthplace of the modern computer industry and once a symbol of America’s can-do culture, is facing an economic catastrophe. For months Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s governor, has been wrangling with the state’s political leaders over a deal to close a $US26 billion budget deficit.

The impasse has left California broke. According to the New York Times, the state has suffered more home foreclosures, big bank failures and job losses than anywhere else in the country. At 11.5 per cent, the unemployment rate is two percentage points higher than America’s as a whole. Rating agencies have downgraded California’s bonds almost to junk status, and the state was reduced to paying its creditors with IOUs in early July.

The crisis has taken the gloss off Schwarzenegger’s governorship. Already, people are speculating about who might replace him at the election for governor due in 2010 (term limits make Schwarzenegger himself ineligible to run again). The big focus is on Gavin Newsom, the photogenic forty-one-year-old Democratic mayor of San Francisco. Before entering politics, Newsom made big money as a restaurant owner and wine entrepreneur. As mayor, two things have tended to dominate his profile: his authorisation of same-sex unions in San Francisco in 2004, and his public admission to an affair with the wife of his former campaign manager three years later, at a time when Newsom and his first wife were divorcing.

Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger – befitting his status as a former Mr Universe and Hollywood action movie hero – is not allowing budget drama, and speculation over his successor, to rob him of attention. Underlying the crisis is California’s dysfunctional state political and electoral system, in which direct citizen democracy competes for power with the state legislature. Even as a deal to resolve the budget paralysis finally emerged in late July, Schwarzenegger described California’s political culture in graphic terms: “It’s like an intersection where people keep crashing into each other.”

THERE SEEMS little outward evidence of such chaos in the streets of San Francisco, or at Blue Bottle Coffee, the café where I meet Chuck Hayward the day after our first encounter at the Jug Shop. Blue Bottle Coffee is in a rejuvenated district south of Market Street, in a square opposite the old California mint building. Opened a year ago, it is the sort of place one associates with the other side of California: its invention of lifestyle trends that then filter their way around the world.

“The coffee here is like legal speed,” Hayward warns me. Indeed, every cappuccino, latte and macchiato is served as an obligatory double shot. People are drinking other blends made-to-order from drip machines that look like they belong in a laboratory.

Hayward is a former government worker, journalist and cook who moved to San Francisco from Louisiana in 1986 to pursue a new life in the wine business. “I was going to teach political science, but it didn’t seem like a lot of fun.” At that time Australian wines were starting to take off in America, where they quickly found a mass market under so-called “critter brand” labels such as Roo’s Leap or, most recently, Yellow Tail. “They struck me as user-friendly wines,” Hayward says.

Then, in the mid 1990s, a new wave of boutique Australian wines from Margaret River, old Barossa Valley wineries and other regions new to Americans changed his assessment. “I remember tasting from two cases and my jaw was on the floor,” he tells me. “They were like wines from another planet, rich, generous, so easy to drink, so voluptuous. They were secrets no one knew about.” Since then, Hayward has made twenty-five visits to Australian wine regions. The Jug Shop, which opened forty-four years ago, now sells one of America’s widest ranges of Australian vintages.

Yet the July New York Times article (which cites Hayward as an Australian specialist) highlights how Australia’s export success over the past twenty years has now bequeathed the industry an image problem. In the rush to cash in on ever-rising demand, making Australia the top seller in Britain in 2004, and the world’s fourth-largest wine exporter by 2007, Australia has come to be seen mainly as a producer of low-cost, high-volume wines at the expense of high-end labels.

Hayward concedes the criticism has some truth. He blames it on what he calls a “perfect storm of laziness” on the part of Australian wine marketers, American importers and wine critics everywhere. As he sees it, Australian wines sold so furiously during the boom years that no one stopped to look at the complexities of Australia as a wine-producing nation, with about sixty regions and a history of old vines going back almost to the arrival of Europeans in 1788. Instead, Americans identified Australia largely as a johnny-come-lately producer, with little to offer beyond the South Australian shiraz that formed the basis of the 1990s accolades from Robert Parker, America’s most influential wine critic. “Everyone was lazy about it on both sides,” says Hayward. “It was like the stock market: why investigate trends or worry about the future when things are going so well?”

I am always intrigued by parallels between California and Australia, and between San Francisco and Sydney. Both cities have rambunctious histories and Pacific-facing harbour locations that have endowed them with a brazen self-confidence. And yet there are differences that say much about the national characters of Australia and America.

On a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, I pause at a plaque on the southern entrance that most tourists ignore as they jog or cycle past. Of the bridge that opened in 1937, it says: “Conceived in the spirit of progress, it shall stand at the gates of San Francisco, a monument to her vision, an inspiration to prosperity and an enduring instrument of civilisation faithfully serving the needs of a quickening world.” No such lofty dedication to destiny and myth-making is to be found at the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which opened around the same time. Australia’s approach is more reticent, reserved, less self-assured about its place in the world.

Hayward sees similar differences in the way Australia and California approach their own wine industries. Both industries, along with New Zealand’s, are labelled “new world” wines by journalists in the British press who, he argues, still see themselves as gatekeepers defining styles and markets, with European wines as the benchmark. And the British press, too, has been bashing Australia over its alleged waning status among its global wine competitors.

“The Napa Valley in California sees itself as a world-class wine region, with no need to compare itself to the great Bordeaux wines,” Hayward tells me. “But Australia still suffers a little bit from an inferiority complex, from being patronised by journos from the mother country and feeling it has to measure Australian wines against the best of Europe. To me, Australian wines really are great wines in and of themselves. The real key is do you want a Margaret River style or a Barossa style, a Tassie pinot or a Yarra Valley pinot?”

With Hayward preparing for another visit to Australia, he suggests a rosier outlook than the one California’s economy is facing right now. As we spin out of Blue Bottle, high on our second coffees, he tells me: “Australian wine can recover from this battering. It’s a slump after a day of fame. Self-confidence has to come from within. You’ve been around for 200 years, and you aren’t going away. There are too many good stories to find in Australian wine if one gets off their ass.” •

The post The other crisis in California appeared first on Inside Story.

YOU DON’T HAVE to drive far out of Adelaide towards the Murray River to see what the fuss is about. The rolling Adelaide Hills, once a region of wet, green farmlands and vineyards, are brown and parched. Down on the plains it gets worse. In New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, there are many rivers to cross; here in South Australia, there is just one. When South Australians talk of “the river” you know they mean the Murray.

Australia’s second-longest river after the Darling, its main tributary, the Murray holds a pivotal place in South Australia’s consciousness. The state’s 1.5 million people are at the end of the line in a river system that covers two-thirds of Australia’s irrigated farming land. Once, that was not such a big deal. Only seventeen years ago, Adelaide relied on the Murray for just 10 per cent of its water; rain-filled dams in the Adelaide Hills provided most of the rest. Now, after the worst drought in a century, the city depends on the Murray for 90 per cent.

All this is making South Australians ever more bitter about how the bigger, water-guzzling eastern states seem to be ignoring their plight. I was last here at the Murray’s mouth early last year, after a working journey following the river from its source as a clear, fresh stream in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales. By the time I reached Goolwa – 2530 kilometres downstream, where the Murray reaches the Southern Ocean – the scene was dispiriting. Dredges pumped out sand to keep the mouth open, while people like Jock Veenstra and his son Michael, tour boat operators, watched their livelihoods literally drying up.

Now, I am back joining a party of business people and water experts to see how far things had deteriorated in just fourteen months. A few days before we set out for the river from Adelaide, Rob Freeman, head of the new Murray–Darling Basin Authority, had delivered some grim news. The volume of water flowing into the Murray–Darling system in the first three months of 2009 was the lowest in 117 years. The three-year volume up to March was the lowest ever. Freeman unnerved Adelaide’s one million people when he said this meant the flow of sufficient water down the Murray to meet their “critical human needs” could not be guaranteed.

Of course, things are not quite as dire as they sound. The opening up of Australia’s interstate water trading market since the 1990s has allowed South Australia’s authorities to buy water from NSW farmers on the Murrumbidgee, 700 km away, and keep it in next year’s store for Adelaide. Typical sellers are rice farmers switching to less thirsty crops or livestock. But Freeman still put his finger on the core issue. Between the system’s upper reaches in Queensland and the mouth at Goolwa, drought, climate change, over-allocation to irrigators, evaporation and sheer theft have all robbed the Murray of too much water. Karlene Maywald, South Australia’s Minister for the River Murray and Water Security (a ministry title only South Australia could create), puts it another way: “About 62 per cent of Queensland, where the Murray–Darling system starts, is in flood. None of that is getting down to us.”

Outside the town of Murray Bridge, about sixty-five kilometres south-east of Adelaide, we stop at the pumping station that serves the city’s southern suburbs. Stations like this pump water from the Murray into a 20,000-kilometre network of tunnels distributing the river’s water all over the state. They run as far west as Ceduna, on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain. On the Eyre Peninsula, I am told, some people still don’t drink Murray water, even after such a lengthy journey to them. “They find it too hard,” says one expert. “They give it to their sheep, water their gardens or shower in it. But they rely on tank rainwater to drink.”

Judging by the picture at the Murray Bridge pumping station, the water’s quality might only get worse. Officials from SA Water, the state water authority, say the river’s height here has dropped over the past three years from its usual measurement of 0.75 metres above sea level to one metre below sea level. Unless the state’s drought breaks and the evaporation rate eases, it will probably drop another 600 millimetres each year.

A crisis proposal to build a weir at Wellington, about thirty-five kilometres downstream, has inflamed debate between water managers and environmentalists. The row hinges on the fate of Alexandrina and Albert, two big lakes into which the Murray finally flows just before it reaches the sea. The people at Murray Bridge say such a weir would stop the river falling and cut the evaporation rate there “enormously.” It would also stop water that has turned saline in the two lakes from moving further upstream.

But this, in turn, would hasten the destruction of the lakes and their surrounding freshwater wetlands. By separating the increasingly salty lakes from the Murray proper, the only grim option would be to flood the lakes with seawater. Penny Wong, the Minister for Climate Change and Water, said recently this must be a “last resort.”

At Murray Bridge I am invited to join a small group to fly over the lakes and the Murray Mouth. Having a poor history of motion sickness in light aircraft, and noting the strong winds, I politely decline. After the flight, one member of the party tells me I made the right decision. In any case, the tale that unfolds at the nearby wine-growing region of Langhorne Creek tells the story just as graphically as any view from the sky.

Since the 1950s, Langhorne Creek’s growers had irrigated their vines from an ancient aquifer. When too much pumping threatened that source’s future, authorities in 1994 switched their water licences to Lake Alexandrina, about ten kilometres away. At that time, plenty of water still flowed down the Murray to keep the lakes fresh. The wine industries at Langhorne Creek and nearby Currency Creek boomed, as new operators bought water licences from other locations on the Murray and transferred their extraction points to the lake. Then another crunch came last year.

Craig Willson, proprietor of Bremerton’s Wines at Langhorne Creek, tells me: “The flows virtually stopped in 2008. The lake has dropped about 1.5 metres. It has turned quite saline. It’s now impossible for us to source its water.” Growers in the two neighbouring creek districts have now formed a company to build a pipeline so they can access water from a fresher location on the Murray itself at Jervois, about forty kilometres east, just above where the Wellington weir would be built. Canberra has provided part of the $105 million estimated cost.

Nonetheless, Craig says he and others have been surprised at some vines’ resilience, and their capacity to survive with less water since the latest crisis hit. Growers of other crops elsewhere in the Murray–Darling Basin may well heed the same lesson.

But perhaps the Langhorne Creek story also captures a wider lesson for Australia, as we grapple with answers to what Rob Freeman of the Murray–Darling Basin Authority calls a drought of “unprecedented persistence and severity.” The drought is only part of the problem. How much longer can we go on searching for new sources of water after we have collectively exhausted or run down the old ones without giving them time to replenish?

Finding an answer will be the first big test for the authority Mr Freeman heads, born last year out of Kevin Rudd’s bid for more cooperative federalism. The authority is the latest attempt to get water management right, in a long line that began when the fledgling federal government first met with the states at Corowa, New South Wales, in 1902 to work out ways of using the Murray’s waters for the common good.

History since then does not augur well for its success. The authority promises a new plan by 2011 covering usage of all the basin’s rivers and groundwater. If it can prove the sceptics wrong, and save the lakes in South Australia from their painful death, that will be achievement enough. •

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