The Australian federal government is being called on to enforce intervention-era alcohol restrictions in the Northern Territory with Country Liberal Senator Jacinta Price calling the current ban a “half-baked policy.”
Price, an Indigenous senator, sought bipartisan support for her Northern Territory Safe Measures Bill 2023, which will establish a federal and territory government partnership to address alcohol-related harm.
Some measures include developing alcohol management plans and a legal framework for prosecution.
“Senators, I plead with you to help me save the lives of those I love and those I’m democratically elected to represent and whose lives we are all responsible for,” she told Parliament on Feb. 8.
“If we can save one woman from becoming the next domestic violence or homicide statistic, we are winning. If we can prevent one child from being sexually abused and left with a venereal disease or internal physical and psychological scarring for life, that is one child. But I know we can do better than this.”
Price Recalls Personal Experience
Price told the Parliament about her experience witnessing numerous horrific incidents take place within her family and community as a result of alcohol abuse. She cried when speaking about how her cousin died in a car crash because the driver’s drunken husband “punched her in the back of her head while she was driving.”
Price added, “our family remember all too clearly the horrific conditions in town camps before alcohol restrictions.”
“So I could understand when my 42-year-old cousin told me on Christmas Day that she was at peace and happy to say goodbye to the world of the living.”
“I could not be angry at her for wanting to leave us all behind. Life in her town camp had become absolutely unbearable again with alcohol flowing back in.”
The bill is considered a carbon copy of the Howard-era intervention law that came into effect in 2012 and was ceased in 2022. Price noted that the lifting of the law has resulted in “increased rates of crime, alcohol-related domestic violence, and alcohol-related assaults.”
Alcohol-related assaults in Alice Springs alone have risen from December 2021 to December 2022 by 54.6 percent, and property damage has increased by 59.6 percent.
