Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Veterans' Affairs, Minister for Defence Science and Personnel and Minister for Indigenous Health. I would like to ask the minister how the government is working to address the impact of alcohol on Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory?

Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence Science and Personnel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Chifley for his question. I also thank the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition for their speeches this morning on the Closing the Gap campaign and its targets. I also thank Minister Macklin for her response earlier on Closing the Gap. I come at this from a different perspective from many in this place. I have now lived in Alice Springs for 30 years and in the Northern Territory for 35 years. I have seen firsthand the impact that alcohol abuse has on my community and the people within that community. A significant proportion of the population living in that community and around Central Australia—indeed, across the Northern Territory—are Aboriginal people for whom alcohol is a problem.

On 1 July 2011, when the former Henderson government introduced the Banned Drinkers Register, it was to much acclaim across the Territory. Indeed, there was strong support for it. What we discovered over a very short space of time, within three months, was that the alcohol related assaults across the Northern Territory were down 15 per cent. In Darwin and Palmerston alone they were down 20 per cent. We had 10,000 fewer antisocial behaviour incidents reported across the Northern Territory. So there was a significant impact on the Northern Territory community. We need to understand, from a public heath perspective, how important the control of alcohol consumption is and how its abuse hurts not only individuals but families. We have seen only recently work on foetal alcohol syndrome across Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. We know what the impact is.

What the Northern Territory government has done since its election, as the result of an election campaign policy, is remove the Banned Drinkers Register. We have seen an immediate spike in drunkenness around Alice Springs. We have seen hordes of people lining up at bottlos and grog shops. It seems to me that a responsible person—and I note that the Leader of the Opposition very responsibly supported the Prime Minister's view and our view—would say that the Northern Territory government should reinstate the Banned Drinkers Register as a matter of urgency. Responsible people would say that it should be done, but unfortunately the Northern Territory government is acting irresponsibly, irrationally and against the best interests of the Northern Territory community. The best thing the Northern Territory government could do is recant on its decision to remove the Banned Drinkers Register and take other steps, in conjunction with us, to address alcohol abuse in the Northern Territory through the alcohol management plans and other measures which Minister Macklin has put in place.