Thread by @Neewok

Begging people to realise the problems in Alice Springs didn’t start a year ago, or 3 years ago. This is the latest iteration in a conversation that has been front and centre for decades.

Here’s a few things that were going on back in 2011. A thread.

bbc.com/news/world-asi…

Opposition leader Tony Abbott called for an intervention into child abuse in Alice Springs and conservatives used the towns problems as a political tool. Crime was on the rise. Kids in the street.

Sound familiar?

“Action for Alice” was already an established local action group which in 2010 made a bunch of ads targeting NT politicians, which were eventually pulled from air for overt racism. These ads are still up on a YouTube page called “AliceinCrisis” started in February 2011.

The racist ads featured images and video of nothing more than Indigenous people existing in public - walking in the street, hanging out on council lawns, kids dancing in front of the 24-hour store, overlaid with scary music and a voice over talking about chaos on the streets.

The principal public face of Action for Alice was Steve Brown, who went on to become a Councillor, Deputy Mayor and the CLP candidate for NT Parliament in 2016 in the seat of Araluen. He was again elected to council in the 2021 local elections and was a prolific climate denier.

The “demands” from Action for Alice back in 2011 included zero tolerance, mandatory sentencing, dog patrols, kicking offenders off welfare, and a youth curfew.

(Apropos of nothing, it was Steve Brown’s initial endorsement of Jacinta Price for Alice Springs Town Council that marked the start of Price’s political career.)

The towns problems also served as a justification for the need for more fossil fuel extraction industries and Action for Alice is blamed for generating negative publicity and affecting the tourism industry.

alicespringsnews.com.au/2011/07/17/loc…

We can go further back too.

“Advance Alice”, a precursor to Action for Alice, was doing vigilante street patrols back in 2007.

The “Chairman” of Advance Alice was Steve Brown, who warned that “vicious retaliation, which must be avoided, is now just a step away.” 2007.

Here are four editions of the Alice Springs News from 2007 containing discussions of youth crime, and the push to implement youth curfews in town.

alicespringsnews.com.au/1346.html
alicespringsnews.com.au/1348.html
 
alicespringsnews.com.au/1405.html
alicespringsnews.com.au/1406.html

So let’s be clear. None of these problems are new and many can be traced directly back to the intervention.

I’ll just note as well that all of these problems existed back when Jacinta Price was a hip hop artist partying and hanging out with the dirty leftists, well before she became radicalised and started repping for Murdoch and the fossil fuel industry (but I repeat myself!).

And interestingly, if anyone has the inclination to look back at Jacinta’s Facebook feed and her sky news appearances anywhere between 2015 and 2018 and I challenge you to find a single mention of Alice Springs. She was all culture war, all of the time.

Shame on her for allowing her community to be used this way, as a fucking prop to deny Indigenous people the basic dignity of constitutional recognition. Hope those Murdoch bucks are worth it.

Anyway. This town has had these same problems going on 2 decades. The conversation doesn’t change. Only the iterations. Seems like our institutional memory is failing. Would be great if we could get the context of all of this from somewhere in the media.

I’ll say one last thing and it’s the example I use when I talk to people about white supremacy in Alice Springs.

The framing of this issue always centres white victims - the “problem” arises when white people are affected by the issues affecting the Indigenous community.

That is, by definition, the mundane nature of white supremacy in Australia today. White people’s problems are supreme - the motivation to act comes not from compassion but from preventing Indigenous problems becoming the rest of society’s problem. Otherwise it’s ignored.

What’s missing from the conversation is any mention of inequality, the massive LNP cuts to frontline services (that Jacinta has been curiously silent about) or any broader vision for Indigenous people from major parties other than assimilation into capitalism.

CLP solutions - more incarceration, more capitalism

NT Labor solutions - just an average amount of incarceration and capitalism

Both captured by fossil fuel interests above all.

Hard to see any solutions coming out of this.

#auspol #AliceSprings #ntpol