NT Banned Drinker Register Racism-in-the-Making

 The Northern Territory's banned drinker register is a highly suspect legislation in a jurisdiction noted for its police racism. The law will be applied by a police force which is overwhelmingly white in makeup.Like all Australian police forces, even the few ethnic and fewer aboriginals in police uniforms have had much of their ethnicity edited out of their mindset by the mono-cultural anglo centric training regime common to all State Police Academies.In a Territory noted for its comparatively high aboriginal population with widespread and justified abhorrence of police, there is little doubt that these laws are a cynical state tailored tool of systemic racism.

 Not only will this experiment fail-it will also drive prostitution and drug use higher. The law will be deceptively easy to circumvent via numerous routes.There will be those affected who simply give their money to someone else to buy alcohol.Their will be those who resort to prostitution to offset the higher cost of purchasing "sly grog." There will be those who simply turn to pot, or other recreational drugs,as a cheaper option.


 There will be an increase in consumption of homebrew products and kava sellers will be ecstatic at the sudden increase in demand for their wares.Sly Grogging will boom.The failed US Prohibition should have taught the entire western world that prohibition only lasts a very short period of time,bringing with it the attendant waiters servants and maitres'd in the smorgasbord of high risk,high profit illicit enterprise.


 Flowing from these laws, the Territory can thank its out-of-touch bureaucrats and legislators for providing the trojan horse which organised crime will ride into their region. Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory will be at the vanguard of the imposition of draconian laws. The only aboriginal people in the territory I'm aware of who support this type of legislation are paid government servants or contractors. 


 For aboriginal people the answer lies not in the imposition of penalties on people who are the victims of wilful government policy failures, but in empowering those victims to work for something which they can readily recognise as personally, familially and community empowering. That inevitably means regaining equity and political control of their own destiny-NOT having outsiders whose presence has had as negative an impact as an aids epidemic dictate their future.


 My respects to the Ampilatwatja Walkoff People