Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It has not been a case of saying, ‘We don’t need any police officers.’ It is a case of the police officers and the facilities not being supplied. Governments are the lawful authority there and they have failed in their job. The question of now opening up communities to everybody who might want to, of their own free will, go there puts a big responsibility on to the government. There is no good intersection in this legislation for asking some of the very pertinent questions about the situation which exists, particularly about the much-quoted—by the government—’rivers of grog’. This is as good an opportunity as there will be to ask the minister: who has been profiting from the rivers of grog? Has that been Indigenous people? If not, who has it been?