I really wanted to like Paul Toohey’s Quarterly Essay 30, Last Drinks - The Impact of the Northern Territory Intervention, and I did like it – on the first read, and at a sitting. It read like a punchy crime novel set in the NT and, while I had a number of moments for pause and real concern, on balance I thought Paul had hit most of his targets – most of which were sitting ducks. I’d been meaning to get back to Last Drinks for a second read to check on the concerns that bothered me the first time around but work, travel and better things got in the way.

First up I’ve got to declare an interest or two here – I’ve known and respected and liked Paul (as much for some of his writing as for his performances in bands like The Pink Bits and, nowadays, The Presley Boys) for years and it was to me that he turned for legal advice the day after he was king-hit by a jealous husband at Throb, a Darwin nightclub, in mid-October 2004. Paul being in Darwin and me on the New South Wales south coast I couldn’t really do much more than offer sympathy and general advice and suggest some lawyers in Darwin that might help him. Five minutes after Paul had rung off the estranged wife of Paul’s king-hitter rang – also asking for advice. She received the same response – I couldn’t help her or her husband, who ended up doing some jail time. Paul lost a few teeth and, well, for mine, he’s not been the same since. The other interest to declare is that for a large part of the last year I’ve been working as a lawyer at the Northern Land Council in Darwin and from time to time had contact with Paul and other News Ltd journalists in that capacity – on one occasion being named in an article in The Australian as a spokesperson for the NLC.

I’ve now had a re-read of Last Drinks and think that my first impressions were wrong and that Paul has missed a too-rare opportunity to provide a meaningful, uniquely insightful and balanced overview of what has happened in the NT since 21 June 2007.

Last Drinks provides no such valuable overview or insight – this is obvious to me from Paul’s writing, including, but certainly not limited to, his fast-and-loose approach to the objective, and readily available, facts and the truth; a tendency to see conspiracies lurking behind every decision or policy he dislikes; a sneering contempt for his sources – particularly Aboriginal people and; perhaps most damning of all for a ‘senior’ journalist on a national newspaper – lazy, sloppy writing indicative of a real lack of interest in providing a valuable commentary from his privileged position. Last Drinks is littered with internally inconsistent, jumbled and just-plain-clumsy paragraphs, it stutters and stumbles from baseless assertion to sneering ‘insight’ and back again, and has wasted page after page that should, if better-edited or at all, have been left in the trash bin of his computer.

The Quarterly Essay is a worthy exercise in Australian letters – Australia hasn’t had the long tradition of excursive essay writing that is such a strong element of popular informed literature in many other parts of the world, particularly in the US, France and the UK. For the most part the Quarterly Essay has provided valuable insights into the Australian condition, politics and our relations with our near neighbours.

Sadly the most revealing insights that Last Drinks provides are into the condition of the writer. What I see in the pages of Last Drinks is an embittered, mean-spirited, uncharitable and, saddest of all, a deeply unsettled and unhappy man, uncomfortable in his own skin, self and chosen country, who goes about his work searching only for the mad and the bad and ignoring the much that is good. In Paul’s Northern Territory life is nothing but Hobbesian: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short – there is no room for the love, humour, skill, art and knowledge of country that he knows – but chooses to ignore – imbue the vast majority of Aboriginal people in the NT. This is not the work of the man I know and respected.

This confusion and despair is perhaps best illustrated in the first words of Last Drinks – whose family is he talking about here?:

All of us wanted our parents to be gentle. Some of us got it, some didn’t. Mostly we needed our parents to protect us. A home may have had an open gate and an unlocked front door, but it needed to be a sanctuary, watched over by protective eyes, a place where children were permitted to grow without being subject to interference from groping hands.

A useful tool used by the Quarterly Essay’s editor is to invite people well-placed to comment in response on each essay in a section labeled Correspondence, and published in the following edition. So, in the current Quarterly Essay31, we have responses to Last Drinks from Julie James Bailey, a volunteer on Aboriginal communities, Professor Larissa Behrendt, an Aboriginal legal academic and commentator, Peggy Dwyer, managing lawyer of the primary Aboriginal criminal practice in the Top End of the NT from 2005 to 2008, Kim Mahood, a long-time Centralian, Peter Sutton, esteemed anthropologist and linguist with decades of experience in the NT, John van Tiggelen, a staff writer for Fairfax, and Rex Wild, co-author of the Little Children are Sacred report and Director of Public Prosecutions in the NT from 1998 to 2006. The primary author is invited to respond to these comments.

The value of the response-to-the-responses tool is illustrated by the back pages of Last Drinks, where Anne Manne devotes 9 pages of response to the 8 comments on her Quarterly Essay29 - Love and Money – it allows for a dialogue between the primary author and the invited commentators.

In the case of Last Drinks the commentators raised a number of valid points – with several taking Paul to considerable task, some cringeworthy in their sycophancy and others relatively neutral. Unfortunately it is indicative of the apparent contempt that Paul has for the Quarterly Essay as a valuable exercise in discourse – or perhaps he was just couldn’t care any more – that his response to the 39 pages of, mainly, well-considered responses to Last Drinks, extends to one begrudging paragraph consisting of a surly response to an irrelevant comment about Paul’s presumed high degree of, though apparent lack of, education made by Peggy Dwyer, the NAAJA lawyer.

And it is the lawyers, that for me, make the most telling responses to Last Drinks.

Larissa Behrendt, who was an indirect target of Paul’s vitriol at worst, gives an even-handed assessment of Last Drinks, praising it where due and gently guiding Paul back from the error of his philosophical and poorly reasoned strays. In particular, she identifies where governments, and their proxies, as Paul becomes in Last Drinks, avoid responsibility by shifting blame – largely onto Aboriginal people, but also between levels of government, to the judiciary and those concerned southerners that Paul believes have no right to comment – a stupid xenophobia long used by conservative politicians and dumb commentators in the north to denigrate any contrary comment from outside of the Territory – and the use of which further demeans the value of Last Drinks. Larissa also identifies, as Paul fails to, the seeds of the Intervention’s ultimate failure:

In many ways, the intervention in the Northern Territory is a textbook example of why government policies continue to fail Aboriginal people. The policy approach was ideologically led, rather than being based on understanding of what actually works on the ground. It was paternalistic and top-down, rather than collaborative and inclusive.

And, while Paul largely ignores the last eleven months of Labor’s intervention, Behrendt holds little hope that they have bought anything new to the prosecution of the intervention:

The Rudd government seems to expend as much energy as the Howard government in spinning the story that the intervention has been a success. It has blindly gone forward, taking little opportunity to reflect on what is working and to discard what is not. Not only has it inherited the mess that the flawed policies are producing, it is now responsible for it.

Peggy Dwyer writes with a barely controlled fury, praising the excellence of much of Paul’s writing but condemning Last Drinks in the first few lines of her piece as:

“angry and obscure, and, worse still, sneering…[the] worthwhile points…drowned in a sea of bitterness, confusion and vitriol.”

Dwyer outlines her role in, and knowledge of, two cases on which Paul chose to hang major threads of his arguments in Last Drinks. She excoriates Paul’s “mangled narrative” of what he gratuitously and wrongly described as the “child-rape” case from Maningrida that involved a number of juvenile offenders. She notes that in open court the sentencing judge pleaded with media representatives to “get their facts straight”, repeating that the accused faced no charges of rape. That caution was repeated in his written, and publicly available, sentencing remarks. Paul, who I know is well enough familiar with the Supreme Court registry to obtain written judgments, sentencing remarks and other Court documents, chose to ignore these strongest of judicial pleas for media restraint and accuracy and engaged in what Dwyer calls a “serious distortion of the facts”.

Rex Wild is the subject of what to me are unfounded and near-defamatory attacks on his professional integrity and reputation – both during his 8-year tenure as the DPP in the NT (surely one of the most demanding roles in the administration of Australian justice) and as the co-author of the Little Children are Sacred report. Paul’s charges against Rex are serious, and include that:

…during Wild’s ten years (sic) as Director of Public Prosecutions he had a history of charging whites with murder but of consistently dealing down Aboriginal killers to manslaughter, or to the lesser dangerous-act-causing-death charge. That was fine, if you viewed the DPP’s function as carrying out social repair work. But the effect of Wild’s tenure as DPP, in my view, was that Aboriginal victims were treated as less important.

Rex’s response to Last Drinks avoids the gutters that Paul wallows in with mordant pleasure and addresses the more outrageous of Paul’s allegations against his work, both as DPP and as co-author of the Little Children are Sacred report. He concentrates on facts and the truth – outlining the obvious, directing the reader to the publicly available prosecutorial Guidelines, like a teacher bringing a recalcitrant student back on track…or a senior jurist giving a few well-deserved slap-downs to a wilfully ignorant journalist who has stumbled into his domain:

The decision whether or not to prosecute is the crucial one. Prosecutions should not be lightly instituted and charges laid should not be more serious than the facts of the case justify. The relevant guidelines are clear and worthy of close examination…The threshold question is, however, whether on the facts that can be properly proved before a court there is a reasonable prospect of a conviction being obtained.” (original emphasis)

And, in what must be a rare example, of Rex, or any senior jurist of similar standing, using exclamatory punctuation in any communication:

Paul points to Dr Nanette Rogers, my much-admired prosecutor-in-charge in Alice Springs, going it alone there, refusing to deal down murders to manslaughter. In fact, Dr Rogers, like other members of the staff, made submissions to the director in accordance with the guidelines. Paul notes, in reference to her cases, that they would be treated as murderers if the case was good enough. Precisely! That is what the guidelines provided! (original emphasis)

One issue I haven’t addressed here that Paul goes on about at some length (and my opinions of the views of The Australian and some of the journalists there may be the subject of a later post) is the issue of permits to enter Aboriginal land in the NT. This was an issue, largely driven by Howard’s long-held ideological objection to the existence of a distinctly Aboriginal form of land tenure as much as his mis-guided notion that entry to Aboriginal land should be free-for-all, that was front-and-centre in the NT Intervention. It is a issue that Paul has strong feelings on and he bangs-on at some tedious length about it in Last Drinks, including taking an unsubstantiated-this-was-a-conspiracy-aimed-solely-at-me swipe at Rex:

The supposedly independent Director of Public Prosecutions, acting, one suspected, under pressure from the Territory government, or perhaps the land councils, appealed. The prosecution had presented my crime, of entering a Territory town, as high-end criminality, up there with burglars and rapists.

Rex’s anger at this allegation of gross impropriety, indeed corruption, in his office is barely concealed in the civility of his response:

Paul, no, I did not receive in that particular case, or any other, any pressure from anyone. (original emphasis)

Rex goes on to correct a few more of the blatant errors made by Paul in relation to submissions by the DPP in relation to two cases that Paul refers to directly, and to the conduct of the DPP’s practice in general in relation to matters concerning Aboriginal violence. Paul also has a swipe at Rex’s role as the co-author of the Little Children are Sacred report, to which Rex responds:

We regarded it as of critical importance that governments commit to genuine consultation with Aboriginal people in designing initiatives for their communities.

…

When the prime minister and his indigenous affairs minister initially announced their emergency response, which included the imminent mobilisation of the military, they deliberately refrained from consultation with the Northern Territory government and Aboriginal people. They consulted with the Canberra bureaucracy. (original emphasis)

Paul Toohey was given an opportunity by the Quarterly Essay to provide us all with the benefits of his insights into the NT intervention – in this, without question, he was uniquely qualified – he was the ranking journalist of the only truly national Australian newspaper, he had all the resources of that agency and had a number of good journalists on-the-ground providing valuable reports from the front-line.

This privilege occasionally had its problems, and some of The Australian’s journalism can rightfully be criticised for its embeddedness in the intervention processes, a too-ready willingness to accept assertions as fact and an occasional failure to critically assess the information provided to them. Nonetheless no other news agency had the access and resources, and the willingness to commit them, in the NT at the time.

Quarterly Essay gave Paul the opportunity to tell us this story in Last Drinks…and he has failed us all.