I’ve written about the NT Ombudsman’s annual reports and the small glimpses that they provide into the various instances of misconduct by the NT Police before here – noting that her annual reports to the NT Parliament only document those matters that come to her by way of formal complaint.

The point that I made then – that Carolyn Richards’ reports into NT Police misconduct present convincing support for the need for an independent authority to investigate allegations of misconduct by NT Police and public officials – are only bolstered by the instances of appalling conduct of NT Police revealed in her latest report.

You can see all of the NT Ombudsman’s annual reports here.

The chapters on NT Police misconduct make for fascinating reading, and there is little to suggest that NT Police conduct, and the quality, supervision and investigation of that conduct, has improved over time.

As Carolyn Richards told the local ABC in Darwin, past NT Police recruiting and training policies may be making no small contribution to these issues:

“…a lack of senior officers in the police force could be a reason why there have been some serious breaches of police duty of care for people in custody. “Because of the influx of new recruitments into the police and because there was a five year delay prior to 2001 where [there] were no police recruitments, we are now in the situation where we’ve got all these young officers out on the beat with six months training.”

The Northern Territory’s Acting Police Commissioner, Bruce Wernham, said: “All new police recruits undergo thorough and intensive training prior to operating under full supervision as probationary constables. “I note the ombudsman’s comments with regards to increased recruiting causing more complaints against less experienced police. “However, I am not aware of any evidence to specifically support this.”

The material in this post comes from just one of the case notes of complaints against NT police documented in the 2008-2009 annual report to the local Parliament of the NT Ombudsman, Carolyn Richards.

Some of the comments made by the unnamed Police Officer in the unidentified NT watchhouse to a prisoner being processed included:

“shut your face.”

“dumb f**k”,

“f**king loser”

“d**khead over there”

“… no brain”

“f**king retard.”

The case note, headed “No brains” detailed the treatment meted out by NT Police to a complainant who was arrested:

“…for breaking and entering. This person had fallen asleep outside the premises, due to being highly intoxicated, and was arrested at the scene. A complaint was subsequently lodged relating to his treatment whilst at the watch-house.”

Even before he made it to the cells he was getting the full benefit of the cop’s limited vocabulary:

“The complainant could be heard mumbling something whilst he was seated on the bench, although it was not discernable as to what was said. One of the attending officers responded with “shut your face.” Further comments made to or about the complainant within the next 30 minutes included, “dumb f**k”, “f**king loser”, “d**khead over there”, “… no brain”, “he’s from CSI, one of our smart criminals who breaks and enters and then collapses outside the scene” and “f**king retard.” There were several officers present during the comments, not one of them suggesting they were wrong or inappropriate.”

And it just doesn’t get any better – for the poor guy in the cell or the cop with the potty mouth.

Further examination of the audio and footage from the watchhouse cameras revealed this tasty little incident:

“…the duty officer was eating a piece of toast. He was pointing to the toast and then himself and later pointed to another breakfast behind the counter. In the officer’s statement he claimed he was indicating to the complainant that his breakfast was behind the counter. However on viewing the video it appeared the duty officer ate the complainant’s toast that was sitting with the complainant’s weetbix. He then went to a box sitting on the bin containing breakfast rubbish and took out a white bag with toast and a carton of milk. The duty officer then poured the milk on the weetbix and brought this, along with the toast in the white bag, to the complainant. It was concerning that the duty officer provided the complainant with toast and milk which appeared to have been taken from rubbish sitting on the bin.”

And thanks to the watchhouse cameras we now know that:

In addition to the inappropriate comments identified above the duty officer was heard and observed making the following statements to or about the complainant:

• “stupid f**king idiot”

• “make things quite clear, …, if you wanna f**kin’ play up I’ll make things hard for you”

• “god, he f**king stinks”

• “didn’t bang head for too long coz it hurt” one officer apparently mocking the complainant to another officer

• Two officers were joking about the complainant hitting his head against the cell door because he

wasn’t given a blanket. One officer stating that the complainant had said he would jump in the air

and land on his head killing himself. The officer then stating “go ahead, do it.” The other officer

stating “make sure you do it in front of the cameras”

• “piece of s**t that he is”

• After the officer established that the complainant was dialling his wife whom he had a domestic

violence order against, the officer said “get back in your f**king cell you spastic”; “you’ve got a

domestic violence order that says you are not allowed to contact her, you f**king wanker. You’re

not allowed to approach her, you’re not allowed to contact her directly or indirectly you f**king

wanker”

• “how about you shut the f**k up”

• “spastic c**t” whispered by officer

And what was the sanction meted out to the officer?

Here again from the NT Ombudsman’s annual report:

It was determined that some of the conduct was highly inappropriate for police officers and in breach of the NT Police Code of Conduct and Ethics and General Orders. The JRC recommended that the officers receive managerial guidance in relation to appropriate conduct when dealing with detainees. The JRC noted that it had already been recommended that the officers receive formal counselling.

The investigation also revealed that appropriate entries were not made into the watch-house log or offender journal.

Great – “counselling” and “managerial guidance” – no mention of the slap on the wrist, an apology to the complainant or any action against those other officers who, by their silent acquiescence, condoned their brother officer’s conduct.

As Glen Dooley of the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) , which provides legal services and representation across the Top End of the NT, told the local ABC:

“…there should be tougher sanctions and more transparency.

“If we had a field officer and that field officer started calling that client a dumb whatever, a whatever loser and a whatever retard and then served them some food out of one of our garbage bins, that person would be sacked on the spot,” he said.

“The report here recommends the officers receive managerial guidance in relation to food hygiene and appropriate conduct when dealing with detainees. That’s limp to me.”

For the benefit of those members of the NT Police reading this who may have forgotten what it says – and for the rest of us who have most likely never seen it before – here is the NT Police Statement of Ethics:

STATEMENT OF ETHICS

Each member of the Police Force is to act in a manner which:

- upholds the rule of law;

- preserves the individual’s rights and freedoms;

- places integrity above all;

- seeks to improve quality of life throughout the community through involvement with the community;

- strives to attain maximum citizen confidence and satisfaction;

- strives at all times for professional excellence;

- strives to maximise the effectiveness of available human and other resources; and

- tempers authority with common sense, discretion and sensitivity

Any bids on how many of those points have been contravened here – all of them? – or none?

Have any thoughts about the effectiveness of the current investigative process for complaints against NT Police?

Your thoughts please!

THESE PICTURES WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

Plastic cigarette lighters, bottle tops, fishing line, fishing lures, parts of shoes, plastic bags – just about anything we get rid of ends up here – in the guts of these baby albatrosses hatched and dead after a too-short life at Midway Atoll in the mid-Pacific.

And all this in a marine reserve, thousands of miles from any continental shore.

I came across these shots from a post by my very good friends at the Southern Ocean Seabirds Study Association (SOSSA) with whom I’ve had the rare pleasures on several occasions of sitting on a rusty boat thirty or so miles offshore from Wollongong with a half-dozen or so very large albatrosses sitting on laps on the wet-deck waiting to be measured, tagged, weighed and released – for the purposes of long-standing scientific research into these most magnificent seabirds.

I’ve written here before about why I take photographs of things that have been killed by human actions – in my case I mostly take photos of roadkill the victims of impacts with our cars that we drive too foolishly and too fast on our roads.

I take these photos because I want to bear witness and attest to the fact of their deaths and to maybe provoke at least one person to slow down when they see a group of large birds ripping into a kangaroo, wallaby or cattle carcass on the highway.

Or to stop and drag that carcass off the roadway and well into the bushes…

And these are the same sentiments that I suspect provide Chris Jordan with the motivation to do what he and his team do so well – documenting the monstrous impacts that the human animal has on this fragile planet.

These photos were taken in Midway Atoll, which the Midway Journey site tells me is:

…a collection of three small islands in the North Pacific, about halfway between the U.S. and Asia, and one of the remotest places on earth.

It is located near the apex of the Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling soup of millions of tons of plastic pollution. The islands are covered with plastic garbage, illustrating on several levels the interconnectedness and interdependence of the systems on our finite planet.

Midway Atoll, one of the remotest islands on earth, is a kaleidoscope of geography, culture, human history, and natural wonder. It also serves as a lens into one of the most profound and symbolic environmental tragedies of our time: the deaths by starvation of thousands of albatrosses who mistake floating plastic trash for food.

You can find out more about this remarkable trip by a team led by renowned photographer Chris Jordan at his home page here and see a whole lot more photographs, documentation and videos at the Midway Journey site here.

And these are true documents of distant and lonely deaths.

As Chris says:

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries.

Enough talk – look at these photos – and then tell me that you don’t care about the junk we pump into the ocean every day!

Now – it worked huh – feel like shit?

Want to do something about this – change your life?

Join the good people at SOSSA or go to Chris Jordan’s home page and donate to support the work they are doing.

Or stop buying plastic cigarette lighters, stupid plastic drink bottles and don’t ever throw your fishing lines overboard…

And please, if you have something to say – register and leave a comment here!

Predictably the Bolter has picked this up and Australia’s blog with the most hits, and perhaps the least sense, has attracted the usual raft of ill-informed comments.

The Northern Myth isn’t familiar with the work of Mark Hughes, but Helen Hughes is a familiar conservative commentator with an interesting twist on matters indigenous and who has recently turned her attention to remote Aboriginal education in the NT.

And not without some controversy.

As reported by the National Indigenous Times in April 2008, Hughes wrote an opinion piece, published in The Australian, that drew on examples from one small north-east Arnhem Land homeland, drawing the following very general analysis from that meagre dataset:

“There are about 10,000 of these illiterate non-numerate teenagers who have been going to school … What is the government of the NT going to do about these 10,000 children?”

But [then] NT Deputy Chief Minister Marion Scrymgour has dismissed her findings and says the claims are “absolutely insulting and offensive”.

“I just find it astounding that she bases a report and a generalisation across the Northern Territory Aboriginal communities based on one small homeland centre that she has visited,” she said. Ms Scrymgour said Prof Hughes had left out “some fundamental pieces of information” and denied the government was providing misleading figures on education standards in the bush.

Nadine Williams, NT president of the Australian Education Union, said Prof Hughes needed to “stop generalising”.

“It would be helpful if Helen Hughes had ever been to some of the places she’s talking about,” she said.

Anyway, now it seems that Hughes and her research assistants are at it again.

In their opinion piece of last Friday, the Hughes’ say that, due to the NT Education Department’s training requirements for remote-based teachers:

Homeland Learning Centres lose eight weeks – almost 25 per cent of the school year – while their staff attend courses for the first and last weeks of each term.

Taking that statement on face value you would think that in each of the hundreds of small homeland schools across the NT students spend two months of each school year sitting in classrooms without teachers.

Fortunately for the students the Hughes’s version of events is at some considerable distance from reality.

It is true that at the top and tail of each term that a bunch of teachers from all over the NT – from homeland and “mainstream” schools – go off for professional development training.

But not all teachers go for that training at the same time. Depending on demand, individual needs or other factors some go several times a year, some perhaps once or twice.

And relief teachers and local Aboriginal team teachers are rostered on to fill the gaps.

How do I know this?

I asked a couple of the teachers here at Yirrkala where I’m staying with family while working on my Aboriginal bird knowledge book project.

The second line of attack that the Hughes’ make – on remote community festivals – suffers the same problem – a few facts and a dose of reality mug their story of apparent bureaucratic indulgence and neglect of the best interests of remote students.

The Hughes’s say that:

The limited school year is further eroded by cultural festivals and sports events regularly scheduled during school hours.

The commonwealth government is a serious offender with its Community Festivals for Education Engagement program. Under this program, 13 indigenous festivals are being held this year…all are held during term time rather than during school holidays.
…
As in previous years, the successful Garma Festival ran this year during the school term in August. Many children lost up to two weeks’ schooling. It would take little effort to reschedule next year’s Garma dates to the July school holidays. Financial sponsors of the festival, including the commonwealth and Northern Territory governments and high-profile private companies, should ensure this change is made.

Being in Yirrkala, just down the road from the Garma festival site at Gulkula, I was curious about the reference to the “many children” that apparently lost up to a fortnight of valuable schooling because of their attendance at Garma.

As the very informative Garma Festival website notes, the festival ran from 7 to 11 August this year – that is Friday through Tuesday.

I asked the organisers of the Garma Festival, the Yothu Yindi Foundation, about the Hughes’ claims.

The CEO of the Yothu Yindi Foundation, Alan James, told me that:

Garma formally starts at 4pm on Friday afternoon. The forums all finish by 4pm Monday afternoon – resulting in one school day “lost”.

Garma is not part of the Federal Government’s “Community Festivals for Education Engagement” program.

The music and multimedia training programs are integral parts of Garma and these operate in consultation and engagement with schools and other educational institutions and provides credits towards VET accreditation, so it is very much a part of formal schooling.

And in relation to the Hughes’ demand that Garma be moved to the June school holidays, Alan James said that:

Garma is strategically linked to a number of other events that are held in the Top End of the NT in and around August. Cooperation between Garma and the organisers of other large events is essential to ensure that logistical bottlenecks – on a national and local scale – are avoided where possible.

August kicks off with the week-long Darwin Cup Festival, then the three core days of Garma (with an extra couple of days for the tourists) the next weekend, followed by the Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Awards in Darwin the following week. The fortnight of the Darwin Festival follows.

The other important consideration – bearing in mind that the more than 2,500 people attending Garma are camping in tents – is that August is the driest time of year – the last thing we want is for Garma to be rained out.

As the Hughes’ should know – but apparently didn’t bother to find out for themselves – one of the most successful events at Garma is the Garma Miwatj Youth Forum, a cooperative venture with Anglicare NT.

As Ann Buxton, Executive Manager for the Youth, Family and Remote area programs at Anglicare NT, told the Senate Select Committee on Regional and Remote Indigenous Communities Inquiry at Hearings in Darwin in May this year:

Over the past four years Anglicare, in conjunction with the Yothu Yindi Foundation, started the Garma Miwatj Youth Forum, which runs parallel to the annual Garma Festival.

We bring together about 250 young people from communities in the regions and it has become a key event.

We promote youth leadership, do a lot of skills development work, and look at issues that young people are experiencing.
Garma has become an important event. It is a little event compared with the overall festival but it helps to give young people in that region a role.

For some time many elders have been interested in supporting young people, getting them engaged in processes, and putting some positive energy into some of the issues that they are dealing with. This forum, which has become important, also brings together about 40 organisations from around that region to help get it off the ground.

It is a great event.

A great event indeed – a bit of training, mentoring, skills development, community support and engagement and lots of positive energy and maybe a fair bit of fun.

Perhaps that is what so bothers the Hughes’ – the idea that a few kids might “lose” a day of school while they do the hard yards at Garma and have some fun while they are at it.

But in the apparently joyless world of the Hughes’ vision of remote education that would represent an abject failure by governments of their core responsibilities to school-children.

There is more – much more – that I could say about the Hughes’ opinion piece – including that their comments about the Central Desert Shire’s policy of only supporting cultural and sporting events held during school holidays was old news and the quotes attributed to the Shire CEO, Rowan Foley and the Shire President, Norbert Patrick, are cast in the present tense.

If the Hughes’ had done some basic research- like having a look at the Council Minutes for the Meeting of 30 September or reading this ABC News report – they would have found out that Foley was stood down as CEO at that meeting.

“Motion 3 was amended to the following: “Whereas the Central Desert Shire has recently suffered the resignation and loss of key personnel attributable to the management style of the CEO, and there have been various complaints lodged relating to the conduct of the CEO and Council management, the Council resolves to direct that the CEO step down on pay for the time being and that LGANT be approached for assistance in resolving the crisis that has developed”. Moved: Councillor Bruce Finter. Seconded: Councillor Ned Hargreaves.”

Sounds to me very much like a Council in crisis management mode.

Makes the Hughes’ call of “Three cheers for the Central Desert Shire!” sound just a bit hollow – particularly when you consider that one of the two organisations to be funded by the Commonwealth’s Community Festivals for Education Engagement 2009 – the Ti-Tree school, according to the information on the Commonwealth website, held it’s festival from Tuesday October 13 to Thursday October 15.

In term time.

And the local governing authority with responsibility for municipal services at Ti-Tree is…you guessed it, the Central Desert Shire.

The folks over at the oddly named (particularly for a firm wanting to make money from the shortcomings of others) spellr.us really do have a point – if the biggest and brightest universities can’t get it right, who is left that we can trust? Governments?

Though you would think that spellr.us, particularly seeing that they want to separate us from our hard-earned,  would at least have a typo-free public face.

This Media Release has been circulating the web for the last couple of days:

13 of the World’s Top 20 Universities Misspell “University” on Their Own Website

Top 10 Most Commonly Misspelled Words. Sydney, Australia, July 7, 2009 – An analysis by enterprise website spell checking platform spellr.us has revealed that on average, 14.2% of web pages on the world’s most prestigious university websites contain at least one genuine spelling error.

The annual spellr.us Higher Education Online Content Survey found that these spelling mistakes ranged from obscure, easy to overlook slip-ups to obvious and embarrassing blunders.

The word “university”, for example, was misspelled by 13 of the world’s top 20 educational institutions . Other significant errors included Harvard Law School’s misspell ing of “professor” on a primary navigation menu , and Ivy League neighbour Yale University’s misspell ing of “Yale University”

Nice to see that even the mob at spellr.us can forget the odd hyphen and period from time to time…

You can see Kevin Garber, the founder of spellr.us in a rather smug little video here

It can be both humorous and horrible to watch a political party eat itself alive in public.

Funny because it is rare that the hubris, rank ambition, incompetence and dummy-spitting of so many are all on public display at any one time.

Horrible because, well, you just don’t really want to see human nature in such a raw state – and blood is such a hard stain to get out of your clothes.

And this thankfully all-too-rare event is being played out in the NT and you can watch and listen to it live – right now, right here in the Northern Territory – as NT Labor’s parliamentary wing munches down on each other.

I got it wrong earlier this week when I said in Crikey that you’d be lucky to get evens on a bet that the NT Labor government of Paul Henderson would make it to the end of June.

Right now his government will be lucky if it is still in power at the end of next week.

On Monday this week ex-Deputy Chief Minister Marion Scrymgour, a backbencher since stepping down because of ill health in February from her position as the most powerful elected Aboriginal politician in the country, had one foot in, the other out, of the NT government tent.

By Tuesday, after a report on Monday’s 7.30 Report by ABC Darwin reporter Murray McLaughlin, she was outside the tent pissing on it for all she was worth – accusing the government of lying to and cheating Aboriginal people.

By Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting, after applying the softest of squirrel-grips to hapless NT Chief Minister Paul Henderson, she was back in the tent.

But that all went hell-west-and-crooked yesterday after the NT News ran a story on Scrymgour’s performance at the Cabinet meeting. By late morning she’d issued a statement to her constituents that she would leave the government and see out her term on the cross-benches as an independent.

The NT News report, and some egregious editorial comments, infuriated Scrymgour – perhaps because of inaccuracies but mainly because she’d lost trust in members of the government to give effect to the deal she’d squeezed out of Henderson the day before.

This much is clear from this part of her statement released yesterday:

“I can no longer rely on all caucus colleagues to implement the concessions that I won in the caucus meeting yesterday”.

You don’t have to read too far between the lines to soon realise that here she is only talking about Henderson, Lawrie, and most particularly NT Indigenous Affairs Minister Alison Anderson, with whom Scrymgour shares little apart from her Aboriginality and femininity.

Put bluntly, Scrymgour simply did not trust Anderson to implement the concessions she’d negotiated with Henderson.

Scrymgour thinks that the leak to the NT News came from Henderson and current Deputy CM and Treasurer, Delia Lawrie. Thats more than a bit of a stretch – it is hard to see what possible value there would be in Henderson and Lawrie bringing down their own government.

Word on the streets in Darwin is that the leak came from a staffer in Henderson’s office – again it is difficult to see any valid motives or reasons for such a damaging leak other than malice or mischievousness.

Henderson, after yesterday’s dummy-spit by Scrymgour, now has two very poor choices – try to keep his failed government alive by dancing to Scrymgour’s increasingly erratic beck and call or hold a fresh election ten months after the last one and more then three years before the next one is due in 2012.

If Henderson takes the first of his choices he risks ultimate and early failure. The first item of business when the NT’s parliament sits next Tuesday 9 June will be a motion of no confidence in Henderson brought on by NT Opposition leader Terry Mills.

Scrymgour apparently has given Henderson her word that she’d support him in any no-confidence motion and that she will support the money Bills for the NT Budget. But Tuesday is a long way away and the way things are going here anything could happen in that time.

Henderson will have to rely on Scymgour or the other NT Independent Gerry Woods to pass any legislation or win motions in the Assembly – and he will still require the casting vote of the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, Jane Aagard.

And Henderson’s second choice – call a new election – would almost certainly see him lose power and a swag of the thirteen seats Labor currently holds in the NT. Labor would be reduced to a rump – just as the CLP Opposition was before the unnecessary early election that Henderson took the NT electorate to in August 2008.

There is little doubt that Henderson and NT Labor deserve such total humiliation – the current chaos in his parliamentary party is largely a result of his ineptitude and poor political management, bad advice and the woeful performance of Labor since Henderson’s predecessor Clare Martin triumphantly led Labor to power in the NT for the first time in 2001.

While many of the failures of Labor in the NT have been felt by the wider NT electorate, it is no coincidence that Henderson’s government has been brought to its knees by an Aboriginal woman. If there is any element of its constituency that Labor in the NT has failed and taken for granted for too long, it is the Aboriginal people that make up roughly one-third of the NT’s population.

From the start Labor, rightly, saw that the keys to power lay in the white-bread northern suburbs of Darwin, and that is where it spread its largesse. But Martin, Henderson and all who advised them failed to meet even the most modest of expectations from its other power-base – the Aboriginal people in remote electorates that have remained loyal to Labor for decades. And with a number of strong Aboriginal politicians on the government benches there was at least some cause for hope that Aboriginal people in the NT would finally get a fair deal from their government.

They didn’t, and it is the supreme irony that the primary causes for the recent massive loss of the faith and trust that many Aboriginal people had in Labor have been the actions of Aboriginal parliamentarians – not least Scrymgour, and her successor as Indigenous Affairs Minister, Alison Anderson.

Scrymgour’s rushed and ill-founded decision in October 2008 to implement mandatory English for four hours every day in the eight remaining bilingual schools in the NT is seen by many Aboriginal people in remote townships as a fundamental betrayal of Aboriginal rights to language and culture.

And the announcement three weeks ago of the Working Future policy by Scrymgour’s successor as Indigenous Affairs Minister, Alison Anderson, is the latest example of the almost complete disconnect between Aboriginal people living in remote townships and NT Labor – particularly hose who loudly trumpet their care for and connections with their constituents in the remote dusty corners of the NT.

Scrymgour saw the Anderson version of the Working Future policy for what it is – a further retreat from the current parlous levels of service delivery and infrastructure provision to remote townships and a fundamental betrayal of commitments given to remote Aboriginal people by her and Pat Dodson, who led a consultation and engagement process that was quickly abandoned and ignored by Anderson.

For Scrymgour, Working Future was now a policy that had been hijacked and fundamentally changed by her arch political enemy, Alison Anderson – Scrymgour’s vision had been to fit the legitimate aspirations and needs of Aboriginal people in remote townships and homelands into the reality of Canberra’s demands for service improvement. Anderson’s version represented little more than a supine surrender to Canberra’s assimilationist directions that 10,000 people be moved away from their homelands to create new ghettos in an arbitrary selection of so-called ‘growth towns’.

I’ll have a lot more to say about this most interesting of Ministers in the near future.

And it is Alison Anderson who may well be the key to the futures of both Henderson and Opposition leader Terry Mills. There is the very real possibility that Anderson could follow Scrymgour’s lead and walk – not to the cross-benches – but across the Chamber to the CLP – gifting Government to the CLP.

And the last word goes to Terry “the man who could very soon be King” Mills.

On his Facebook page this morning he says that:

“A day is a long time in politics. Every day this week has been long! Wonder what today has in store? Former Deputy Chief Minister now independent member will make a statement today to explain her unusual actions of the past few days. With 11 Country Liberal, 11 Labor and two independents holding the balance of power democracy is getting workout in the Territory!”

Your comments please!

Recently the local head cop, NT Police Commissioner Paul White, hosted an annual conference of Australasian police chiefs in Darwin. In the spirit of his previous comments on the activities of OMCGs, Tara Ravens, in this report from the Sydney Morning Herald says that Commissioner White:

…believed “extreme measures” were needed. “There is no single piece of legislation that is going to cure the problem,” he said. “It’s a matter for us to work together to use our best endeavours to counter the national effects of these outlaw motorcycle gangs. “These people are dangerous, they are involved in murder, they are involved in drug trafficking. They are assailants. You name it, they’re in it.”

And, while you would think that in these times where security is apparently such an all consuming concern that a gathering of the leaders of Australian police forces would be locked down in a set of hermetically sealed secure rooms where they would be protected from the nefarious forces committed to undoing their good work – particularly those evil OMCGs – it appears that the cops chose comfort over security.

The boss cop’s chose the local casino in Darwin for their accommodation for the week, and, to the alarm of several involved, it turns out that they shared their accommodation with…a bunch of Hells Angels in town for a bit of hunting and fishing.

As Dylan Welch reported in the Sydney Morning Herald:

It was a police conference about outlaw bikie issues, but nobody expected the Hells Angels to actually attend.

…

…within hours of the senior police and their entourages arriving at Darwin’s hotel and casino complex, SkyCity, Northern Territory police security realised the commissioners were sharing a hotel floor with two Hells Angels. The Hells Angels had not arrived to cause problems, but for “rest, relaxation and a party”, a bikie source said. “NT police security assessed the situation and gave the two members the option to change their rooms,” a NT police spokeswoman confirmed. “The two members declined and chose to take accommodation elsewhere.” In one of the more humorous moments, the two Hells Angels arrived to get on a commercial fishing boat the day after the conference ended only to find six police commissioners also planning a spot of fishing. “The members were interrogated by police as to what they were doing there – you know, assassination plot or fishing plan,” the bikie source said.However, he said the federal police commissioner, Mick Keelty, “went into a hyper state” after running into two Hells Angels in the foyer of SkyCity. A spokesman for Mr Keelty said there was no “incident or interaction whatsoever with the commissioner and any bikies or bikie associates”.

This is all small beer in the scheme of things and of course the cops then got down to the heavy work of saving us all from the apparently serious threats that OMCGs pose to our health and welfare.

It is useful to have a brief look at what is but one indicator of why we should be a little less ready to accept the hype broadcast by the forces of law and order that the OMCGs are some form of criminal evil incarnate.

A few years ago The Finks MC held a run to Alice Springs to celebrate the opening of their new clubhouse. Predictably the NT police reacted with their usual strength in numbers and force – as the NT Police media office reported:

A team of police officers led by Detectives from the Drug and Intelligence Unit, Alice Springs, executed a total of six search warrants between Thursday 13 April and Saturday 16 April 2006 on a clubhouse, a business and four separate residential properties in the town area all known to be linked to the gang.

The Police seized an unknown quantity of speed, some firearms, ammunition and minor weapons and arrested one woman and four men, only one of whom was a Finks MC member.

A month later it appears that the Finks MC members and associates were still in the Alice and the cops were still on their case. Whether through frustration at being unable to pin some major crimes on The Finks MC members while they were in Alice or through sheer drunken stupidity, on the Sunday night of the weekend of 6 and 7 May 2006 a few of the Police involved took matters into their own hands.

As the local NT News reported at the time:

Six off-duty police officers who allegedly damaged property inside an outlaw bikie gang’s clubhouse were caught on video camera, it was claimed yesterday. The Darwin-based officers are believed to have kicked in the door of the clubhouse in Alice Springs last week after an alleged drinking session at a nearby hotel. It is alleged that in two separate raids, a numberplate was stolen from a vehicle parked outside the clubhouse and a sign smashed. The bikies claim they captured the alleged break-in on video and gave the tape to police early last week.

Another officer involved in the operation claimed the six off-duty officers had been drinking on the night of the incident and had tarnished the reputation of the police force. “They went out and got on the piss and destroyed the integrity of all the other officers involved in the operation,” the officer alleged.

NT Police media director Sandra Mitchell denied the Police Commissioner had paid $1000 over the bar for the officers’ alcohol on the night of the incident. “The Commissioner paid for absolutely no drinks at the end of the operation,” she said.

That the Commissioner didn’t pay for a few drinks doesn’t really answer the question now does it? Maybe the local commander fronted the bar tab – who knows?

In July 2006 the NT Police media office reported that the six off-duty NT Police officers who had been involved in the ‘incident’ at the Finks MC clubhouse in Alice Springs were the subject of NT Police internal disciplinary proceedings.

The six officers were suspended with pay following a preliminary assessment of the circumstances of the incident, which allegedly occurred on the Sunday evening, after the completion of a special policing operation. Three of the officers were recently allowed to resign and another had his appointment as a police officer terminated. The two remaining officers who were suspended are the subject of ongoing disciplinary matters.

The six officers were part of a major operation conducted to maintain law and order and public safety during an event which saw in excess of 100 members and associates of the Fink Motor Cycle Gang converge on Alice Springs on the weekend in question. They were alleged to have been involved in two incidents involving property at the Finks club house.

Commissioner of Police, Paul White, said the allegations were serious and it was unfortunate that the success of the operation had ended up on this note. It was also regrettable that the careers of the four police officers had ended in this fashion.

The operation in Alice Springs was noteworthy for its professionalism and positive effect. The visible and focussed police presence ensured an incident-free weekend for residents of Alice Springs with social order maintained despite the large number of Fink members in the town, said Commissioner White.

Yes, well he would say that wouldn’t he…it is a very rich spin indeed that regards three officers resigning and others having their appointments as Police officers terminated as an exemplar of professional conduct likely to instill public confidence in the integrity of the NT Police force.

Other versions of the events were not so circumspect. A more humorous, and most likely more accurate, version of events was reported by the Sydney Morning Herald on 10 July 2006:

LAW AND LAST ORDERS

Cops and bikers don’t mix very often, but when they do, things get ugly.

After a “drinking session” at the pub, some off-duty Northern Territory police allegedly decided to try to spook a local bikie gang after supporters of the Finks arrived in Alice Springs to celebrate the opening of a new clubhouse. Six tipsy officers converged on the premises and kicked down the door. What happened next is not yet public, but we assume it involved lots of stumbling around the shadows, an occasional meaty thud and some muffled curses.

The surprised bikies captured most of the raid on video and did the responsible thing: handed it in to the police. Three officers have resigned, another was sacked and two are being investigated. No bikies have yet been promoted.

I’ll continue to follow and report on similar incidents of NT Police misconduct – particularly in relation to bikers in the NT – not only because such incidents are relevant in the broader scheme of the legislative and policy responses to the supposed threats that the activities of OMCGs present to peace and good governance but, more importantly, how effective those responses are – particularly in a context where individuals are targeted for the mere fact of their association with members of their club – rather than any particular crimes they may have themselves committed.

Meanwhile, calls for widening of extreme laws against criminal bike gangs (see Gangs rally for legal challenge), and the probability of a renewed moral panic in the wake of the latest minor upsurge in “boat people” arrivals off northern Australia, seem certain to bring these matters back into sharp legal and political focus.

As Ken Parish said in this post over at Club Troppo recently in relation to the current ongoing disputes between the State and the Courts – a fine example of what post-structuralists call ‘the state of exception’ – as exemplified by the High Court of Australia’s recent judgement in Thomas v Mowbray:

In case I haven’t made myself clear, my point is more nuanced than the tiresome left versus right dualism that pervades both the blogosphere and MSM. Terrorism, criminal bikie gangs and people smuggling operations are entirely legitimate subjects for government concern and possibly legislative action. However, they demand proportionate responses, and carefully considered checks and balances to reduce the risk of extraordinary powers being abused. Kneejerk populist political responses to media-fuelled moral panics don’t produce optimal or even workable laws or policies.

Antelopine Wallaby (?) near Katherine 2006

I’ll be chairing a session on Monday next as part of the Alice Springs Writers Festival at the wonderful Olive Pink Botanic Gardens in a session called Roadkill – the Festival program tells me that:

“The roadtrip is iconic in Territorian culture. Join Jennifer Mills, Richard J Frankland, Shane Maloney & Mary Anne Butler for some fine, highway cuisine and roadhouse yarns. Facilitator: Bob Gosford. Roo stew; free coffee to every driver. 12:30-2:00pm Courtyard, Olive Pink.”

So – be there or be elsewhere! as a Swamp Jockey once told me.

Unidentified kangaroo species, Tanami Track, 2007

But more seriously, I’ve been taking photos of roadkill I’ve come across on the side of – or just on – the various roads I’ve spent so many hours driving and riding on over the years and I look forward to adding to my selection over the coming months as I travel the country to meet and talk with various Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and groups about their local bird knowledge.

One day I’ll work on putting them together for an exhibition – and in this I’m mindful of the – apparently excellent – eponymous exhibition put together some years ago by the wonderful Fairfax snapper Narelle Autio.

Among many other national and international awards, in 2001, Narelle won a 1st Prize World Press Photo Award in nature and environment for her series on Australian roadkill – unfortunately I haven’t found any of these images online to share a link to…

Unidentified Wallaby species - Stuart Highway 2006

For me these images of dead things are ineffably sad – they vary from the freshly dead – covered in flies and picked over by dingoes, eagles and hawks – to the dispersed and dessicated carcasses – sometimes scattered across the roadside – sometimes slowly being ground to paste or dust – dependent on the season or the location – on the roadway.

Unidentified species, Stuart Highway 2006

I have a compelling fascination with these poor dead and lost souls left on the highway – in some parts, particularly on the more well-traveled NT roads like the Stuart Highway, there are literally hundreds of carcasses littered along the particular stretches of the road – often near drainage lines and floodways – sometimes clustered together in an area with no indication as to why they cross the road at that point.

Many of the victims are birds – too many birds – and kangaroos and wallabies, horses, cattle, pigs, cats…all that crosses or intersects the road will at some time fall victim to our fast foolishness…

Wallaby, Stuart Highway 2006

More, many more, to come…sadly…but I feel a need to bring these things to you – as a witness to the fact of their deaths, to prove that they did die and still live – in an image or in our minds and hearts – even as we pass their wrecked bodies in our behemoths, uncaring and unseeing.

For most of us wildlife on the road are little more than bothersome intruders on our time or convenience – think of how we view them – “a kangaroo hit my car”, “A dingo ran into me”, “A bird hit my windscreen” – maybe instead of blaming the animals we should instead be saying “I committed a murder of a kangaroo today”, “I was driving too fast to let the Wedge-tailed Eagle get enough height to get off the roadway” or “I didn’t slow down to let that Goanna cross the road safely”.

Got a roadkill story – share it with us by leaving a comment.

As Lindsay reported:

The documents show the Centrelink account balances of many residents of Yuendumu, 293 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs, whose welfare payments have been quarantined under the federal indigenous intervention.

…

The discovery is likely to increase tensions in the community of about 700 where residents whose incomes are quarantined can buy goods only in the Nguru-Walalja store, operated by Outback Stores, a government-owned but independently operated company that has 27 stores across Australia.

The ABC spoke to Yuendumu resident Valerie Napaljarri Martin shortly after she had given evidence to the House of Representatives Committee currently conducting an inquiry into the operation of remote stores:

Valerie Martin said she was shocked when she was shown her name on the list of documents given to the inquiry. “Oh my god,” she said. “Look, I just seen my name written on it now. That makes me even more angry. Who do they think they are? Coming in to our community and doing that to us.”

Now I’ve got to disclose an interest here – I was engaged by the Yuendumu Social Club Store Inc (aka ‘The Big Shop‘ or the ‘Yuendumu Store‘) as a consultant to prepare and give testimony to both the current House of Representatives Standing Committee Inquiry into community stores in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and the Senate Select Committee on Regional and Remote Indigenous Communities.

Both Committees have recently held Hearings in and around Alice Springs. I gave evidence at the House of Representatives Committee on Tuesday 28th April and met with the Senate Committee last night.

The major thrust of my submissions to the Parliamentary Committees related to the attempts, unsuccessful so far, to become licensed by FaHCSIA to accept income-managed funds and the related BasicsCard stored-value Card administered by Centrelink.

I also gave information to both Committees, including copies of Statutory Declaration detailing the events around the discovery of the documents at the Yuendumu dump and a copy of a letter given to Centrelink when the documents were provided to them.

I also have an involvement in the Centrelink documents story – earlier this month one of the managers of the Yuendumu Store, Mr Mark Vegera, contacted me and told me he had found some documents at the Yuendumu dump, a few kilometres outside of town. I later went to the dump and found some more of the same documents.

As Mark Vegera says in his Statutory Declaration in relation to the content of the material he found in a rubbish bag at the Yuendumu dump:

I noted that the papers in the rubbish bag appeared to be from the Nguru-Walalja store at Yuendumu which is operated by Outback Stores Pty Ltd. There were a number of cash register receipts, assorted facsimile pages and correspondence, and daily cash register totals sheets. Also included in the papers contained in the bag were loose copies of reports with the words “Income Management, End of Month Reconciliation”.

From my brief examination of the material in the bag it appeared that it was sensitive material, particularly in that it appeared to contain personal information of a private nature about a large number of residents of Yuendumu. I placed the material in a box and returned to the YSCS where I secured the material in the YSCS office under lock and key.

Later that week I examined the documents that I had found at the Yuendumu waste facility more closely. It soon became obvious to me that one particular group of documents appeared to contain information of a highly personal and private nature.

The front page of each group of documents that appeared to contain sensitive personal and private material had the words “Income Management End of Month Reconciliation” at the top of each page. Under them were the words “Organisation name: Nguru-Walalja Store (Country Store) Yuendumu”… . There were approximately 50 or 60 pages of this material. In the top right hand corner of the first sheet were the words “Page 1 of 8″.

The body of each sheet of paper consisted of six columns of words and figures under the column headings, reading from left to right, “Customer Details”, respectively “First name”, “Surname”, “Cust. CRN” “Credit”, “Debit” and “Balance”.

The 8 pages of each document consists of lists of named persons with their individual “Cust. CRN” listed against each name in that column. I understand the words “Cust. CRN” to be a shortened reference to “Customer Centrelink Reference Number”. Then follows the columns headed “Credit” and “Debit”, most of which have balances entered as “$0.00″. The last column on the right-hand side of each page was headed “Balance” and that column on each page had a variety of numbers entered as, for example, “$5.55″.

After I went to the Yuendumu dump and found more documents of the same kind I also prepared a Statutory Declaration, in which I detailed how the material located by me and Mark related to those people at Yuendumu who have their welfare income quarantined under the Federal Government’s Income Management scheme:

The total number of names and other material listed varies from about three hundred and seventy to about three hundred and ninety names.

I believed that the material found by Mark Vegera and myself was material that would be subject to the provisions of the Privacy Act 1998. I was uncertain as to how this material should be dealt with but believed that it would be appropriate that it be provided to Centrelink who would be able to take any further action. On Thursday 23 April I contacted the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in Canberra. An officer of the Privacy Commission advised me that it would be appropriate to return the material to Centrelink. They further advised me that it would be appropriate to retain a copy of the material so that it may be forwarded to the Privacy Commission to accompany a complaint to that body or to be forwarded so that the Commission may conduct an assessment as to whether an “own motion” inquiry by the Commission may be appropriate or in the event that any person or persons to whom the information contained in the material referred may wish to make a complaint to the Privacy Commission.

I came into Alice Springs on Monday 27th April to prepare for the House of Representatives and Senate Hearings.

On Monday afternoon I went to Centrelink and delivered the originals of the sensitive material found at the Yuendumu dump to Centrelink.

It is apparent that Centrelink views breaches of the Privacy Principles very seriously. As a Centrelink spokesperson told the ABC:

…the organisation has strict rules for stores about protecting privacy and the matter is being urgently investigated.

Indeed. In 2006 Centrelink ‘forced out’ or sacked over 100 staff who had inappropriately accessed information subject to privacy restrictions. As the Sydney Morning Herald reported at the time:

The government’s welfare agency has confirmed it uncovered almost 600 cases of staff wrongfully accessing client records during the last two years.

A total of 19 staff were sacked and 92 resigned when faced with accusations of privacy breaches.

More than 300 staff faced salary deductions or fines, another 46 were reprimanded, and the remainder were demoted or warned.

“What this demonstrates is that we exercise zero tolerance in this area,” Centrelink general manager Hank Jongen told ABC Radio.

“It shows our staff that we are absolutely serious about maintaining the privacy of our customers.”

And in relation to the security of Private Information held or generated by private operators, like the Outback Store at Yuendumu, Centrelink’s Terms and Conditions for BasicsCards Merchants import the provisions of the Privacy Act:

27. PRIVACY LAW
27.1 Privacy Obligations

The Merchant must not, and must ensure that any subcontractor does not, do an act or engage in a practice in relation to this agreement that would breach an Information Privacy Principle if done or engaged in by Centrelink.

27.2 Interpretation of Privacy obligations
Information Privacy Principle has the same meaning in clause 27.1 as it has in the Privacy Act
1988.

Time will tell how Centrelink will treat the inappropriate disposal of this material at the Yuendumu dump – certainly it appears to have a wide range of options of actions that it might take against Outback Stores.

Both of the Parliamentary Committees were very interested in how personal private information is being treated by the Government’s favoured provider of store services to remote communities in the NT.

And the Privacy Commission will be provided with a copy of the same material as provided to Centrelink and both of the Committees – it will be interesting to see whether the Privacy Commission decides to initiate an ‘own motion’ inquiry under the Privacy Act.

And of course there may be more than a few of the 400 or so Yuendumu residents whose personal information was in the documents dumped by Outback Stores who may want to make a complaint to the Privacy Commissioner as well.

Watch this space!

I’ve recently written here about the apparent reign of criminal terror that the bakers dozen of Hells Angels MC members and the sole representative of the Finks MC that live in the Northern Territory are, if you are foolish enough to believe the spin coming from NT Police and politicians, wreaking across the length and breadth of the NT.

And, according to the Northern Territory Police Commissioner, Paul White they represent a real threat to that esteemed citizen of the NT, Laura Norder. As he told the ABC earlier this week:

…it is important that police in the Territory work with all Australian police to stamp out the gangs, as members are very closely linked to their interstate counterparts.

“They are a national network,” he said.

“They are involved in murder, shootings, violence, drug supply, extortion. You name it, they do it.

“And they’re just out and out criminals and the NT Police is really keen to keep on top of them.”

White will host a meeting of Australian and south-west Pacific Police Commissioners in Darwin this week.

As the spinners at the NT Police media unit describe it:

Commissioners from Australasia and the South West Pacific Region are making their way to the Top End for the Annual Police Commissioners Conference 2009. The Northern Territory Police are the hosts of this years Commissioners Conference entitled ‘Leading and Managing Change in Policing – Serious and Organised Crime.’

Topics including policing outlaw motorcycle gangs, alcohol issues, unsolved homicide and criminal property confiscation, will be discussed at this years conference.

My real concern here is that, perhaps more than anyone else in the NT, White should at least have a minimal appreciation of the distinction between hyperbole and fact – saying that all members of the HAMC and the sole Fink in the NT are involved in a panopoly of crimes from murder down seems to me to be well over the top in terms of hype and spin and more than likely factually wrong.

One novel approach that the NT Police has taken to ‘keeping on top of’ the members of the Hells Angels MC and their predeccessors in the NT, the Blonks MC, and apparently with the assistance of the Australian Crime Commission, is to hit the thirteen members of so-called Outlaw Motor Cycle Gangs (OMCGs) living in the NT in their hip pockets and to seize their land title.

Before the Hells Angels came to the NT, the NT’s only OMCG was a group known as the Blonks MC (Bike Lovers Only Need Kick Starts).

The Blonks MC kicked off in the early 1980’s based in Darwin and were the subject of a soft takeover by the Hells Angels MC in 1993 after a number of Blonks MC members became affiliate members of the Adelaide chapter of the HAMC.

The Blonks MC had a large property at Darwin River and the Blonks MC clubhouse at Howard Springs became Hells Angels property – at least in practice. But it appears that they failed to effect a legal tranfer of ownership of the larger block of land.

The Blonks were incorporated in 1986 under the NT Associations Act, section 65 of which allows the Commissioner of Consumer Affairs to dissolve an Association which ‘is not carrying out its objects or is not in operation‘. Section 68 of the Associations Act provides that, subsequent to that dissolution, the property of a dissolved association vests in the Commissioner, who may then sell it.

I’m unclear what has happened to the Blonks MC land at Darwin River but on 12 July 2006 the Commissioner of Consumer Affairs issued a Notice that the Blonks was dissolved.

Following that Notice the Public Officer of the Blonks MC, Paul Anthony Johnson, took action in the NT Court of Summary Jurisdiction challenging a related matter of a declaration by the NT Police Commissioner under section 40 of the Associations Act that he was a person ‘unfit to be an officer of an incorporated association’.

Johnson’s application was heard by Magistrate David Loadman, who, on my reading between the lines of his judicial language, was scathing of the actions of the NT Police and their apparent misuse of the powers in the Associations Act, describing the power to declare a persons ineligibility to be a Public Officer by the processes available as ‘draconian’ and that:

Extraordinarily the police whose certificate is the very basis for the decision the subject of the appeal cannot as is evident be compelled to even tell the court of the basis on which the certificate was given. Mr Anderson for the Respondents made the alarming submission that this statutory exemption extended to every officer in the Northern Territory Police Force which would seem to make a complete mockery of the process and severely offend the principles of natural justice or procedural fairness as it is also known.

Johnson gave evidence in which he stated that, contrary to the assertion that he was a person unfit to be a Public Officer he had never been convicted of a criminal offence and that he had been a member of the Blonks MC and later of the Hells Angels MC, a point that received a lot of attention during his cross-examination, the reason for such extensive cross-examination Magistrate Loadman found ‘was obscure’.

Character witnesses gave evidence that Johnson was a hard working family man that enjoyed riding motorcycles.

Magistrate Loadman then considered the evidence of the NT Police in support of the declaration that Johnson was an unfit to be a Public Officer. That evidence came in the form of an affidavit and sworn testimony from Detective Sergeant Jamie Andrew Chalker, then a 12-year veteran of the NT Police.

Magistrate Loadman’s construction is a bit clumsy but nonetheless he is scathing of Chalker’s evidence and the NT Police case, which amounted to nothing more than wild assertions masquerading as facts that Johnson was unfit to be the Blonks MC Public Officer. It is worth quoting at length:

The significant observation by the Court which will be made repeatedly is that there is no evidence provided by him to support that statement and the proposition which was the subject of some comment by the Court after he had finished his evidence that the second Respondent was firstly not compellable or to give evidence, but could come along make that sort of statement not supported by any evidence, is regarded by the Court as extraordinary.
He describes an extensive knowledge or alleges an extensive knowledge derived from intelligence reports and other sources, but again doesn’t in fact disclose that knowledge which indeed he consistently refused or declined to do.
He alleges that as an investigator he is possessed of a thorough understanding of HAMC; the roles and responsibilities of its members, but again was not prepared to disclose the basis upon which he was able to make the statements that he did. Relevantly he said that since 1993 Blonks Motorcycle Club Inc was used solely for the convenience and the advantage of the Darwin Chapter of HAMC. The statement is made without any supporting evidence being called and it seems that the Court, at least in his perception, is supposed to accept whatever he says as having been proven by admissible evidence.

Much of his evidence was related to the undisputed fact that the Appellant was a full member of HAMC and nothing significant turns on that. Annexure JAC4 to Chalker’s affidavit is a list of members of “Blonks Motorcycle Club Inc” provided by the first Respondent. The Appellant was not sure whether he was a member of that organisation, but the fact that he is in fact a member is neither in dispute or in anyway remarkable. He never denied he was such a member.

He then asserts criminal records and activities pertaining to James Scott Parnell Knight and Ian Grant Hogan both members of HAMC. Quite why that should prove the Appellant is an unfit person for the job or not a fit and proper person for the job of public officer is at least remote in this Court’s perception. He gave oral evidence that although the Appellant denied being involved in the cultivation of cannabis, possession of stolen property and possession of illegal firearms (pistols) he maintained his involvement, but gave the same reasons for the absence of any evidence namely he was unable or unwilling to reveal the basis for his contrary view and the Court remarks in a like manner as it has in respect of concomitant assertions by him.

…

As Mr Powell [for Johnson] correctly says absolutely no procedural fairness has been observed. The allegations are made without any supporting evidence.

Magistrate Loadman then proceeds to reject outright a number of submissions made to him by Counsel for the NT Police. In respect of the last of these he notes that:

It is extraordinary in this Court’s finding to hear a submission from Counsel to the affect that when a witness claims privilege against self incrimination it ought alone to suffice to enable the Court to find he is not a fit and proper person to hold public office. The Court emphatically rejects that proposition and finds it quite alarming.

He then proceeds to put the NT police case, based upon no facts, in an historical context:

It is also significant that section 114(6) of the [Associations] Act specifically cites “the Court may make its decision only on the evidence given by a party to the appeal” what could be more clear. Without evidence the Court cannot make a decision and is certainly not prepared to make the decision on the basis of statements by police officers, this smacking of that hoary old chestnut, “trust me I’m a lawyer” in this case “trust me I’m a policeman”. We do not any longer have courts functioning in the manner of the Star Chamber. That reference is a reference to the Court of Star Chamber which by the time of the reign of Charles I of England had become synonymous with misuse and abuse of power by the King and his circle.

Unsurprisingly, Magistrate Loadman granted Johnson’s appeal against the declaration that he was a person unfit to be the Blonks MC Public Officer.

Round Two in the fight by the Blonks MC against the NT Police was fought in the NT Supreme Court, where Johnson made application to overturn the Notice of June 2006 to dissolve the Blonks MC. At stake here was the valuable property of the Blonks at Darwin River.

Before Justice Steve Southwood Johnson enjoyed none of the fortune he received in the Magistrates Court and in his decision in Johnson v Commissioner of Consumer Affairs [2009] NTSC 4 Southwood J found that the Blonks MC had in fact not been functioning since about mid-2006 and that Johnson’s application be dismissed.

In effect what this meant was that the valuable property at Darwin River would vest in the Commissioner for Consumer Affairs, i.e. the NT Government.

The Hells Angels MC and their associates in the NT had been the subject of considerable attention by both the NT Police and the ACC through the latter agency’s OMCG Task Force. In late 2004 and early 2005 the ACC issued a number of summons to NT Hells Angels MC members requiring that they appear before an ACC Examiner in Darwin and compelling them to give evidence in relation to their knowledge of the activities and finances of a person named Gary William Watt and the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club from 1995 and those of the Blonks Motorcycle Club Inc and the Blonks Trust from 1985.

All of the Hells Angels refused, apparently on legal advice, to answer the ACC’s questions despite being ordered to do so. They were all subsequently arrested and charged and all eventually entered guilty pleas (see R v Dunkerton, Wills and Eaton, R v Johns and R v Knight, Johnson and Murphy)

What is interesting in these matters is that in relation to the assumptions, current at the time that the cases being heard and also, per Commissioner White’s contemporary comments above, still alive in the minds of the NT Police to this day, that all members of the Hells Angels MC are inherently criminal.

Here it is clear that the Court had direct evidence relating to the character of each of those entering guilty pleas and that evidence shows that notwithstanding a few with serious criminal histories, most of the members of the Hells Angels MC charged by the ACC had no, or relatively minor, criminal histories.

Wills had several old and minor convictions and had been conviction-free since 1996. He was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment, to be released after two months on good behaviour and thence to be bound to a $5,000 good behaviour bond for two years.

Eaton similarly only had a few old and minor relevant convictions but was considered more culpable than Wills and was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment, to be released after three months on good behaviour and thence to be bound to a $5,000 good behaviour bond for two years.

Like Wills and Eaton, Dunkerton only had a few old and minor relevant convictions, though had received a suspended sentence for assault and was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment, to be released after three months on good behaviour and thence to be bound to a $5,000 good behaviour bond for two years.

In the separate proceedings of Knight, Johnson and Murphy, Johnson had no relevant or recent criminal convictions and was released on a bond of $5,000 to be of good behaviour for two years. Parnell was sentenced to 9 months imprisonment to be suspended after two months and thence to be bound to a $5,000 good behaviour bond for two years. Murphy, like Johnson, had no relevant or recent criminal convictions and was released on a bond of $5,000 to be of good behaviour for two years.Johnson had no relevant or recent criminal convictions and was released on a bond of $5,000 to be of good behaviour for two years.

Johns appeared in separate proceedings to the others before Justice Angel, most likely, as the judge noted, because he gave evidence that he had left the Hells Angels because he had ‘mentally outgrown the members of that club’. Johns was sentenced to ten months imprisonment but to be suspended on the rising of the court. Johns was also bound to a $5,000 good behaviour bond for two years.

What I think these cases show is that, despite wielding their best investigative and propaganda efforts and their considerable legal and administrative resources the NT Police and agencies like the ACC have, overall, been frustrated in their attempts to break the Hells Angels in the NT.

They have had several wins – several have Hells Angels received jail sentences, even if only for relatively brief terms, and the NT Government, through a flanking approach to the property rights and interests of the Blonks MC and Hells Angels MC, has been able to effectively seize a valuable piece of property – but the Hells Angels are still free to ride the roads of the NT – albeit, it seems, with an almost permanent NT Police surveillance effort.

What an absolute waste of good public money.

China is not a good place to be a bird. I learnt this when I moved from Hong Kong, still a British colony, to Beijing. Though my home in Hong Kong was in the heart of the city, dense scrub tumbled down the slopes from the Peak. I was driven out of bed every morning by a raucous dawn chorus. The violet whistling thrush was among the first to start up, and the hwamei (”beautiful eyebrow”), with white eyestripe and rich territorial song. The koel, a tropical cuckoo that lurks in thick cover, has a rising bisyllabic wolf-whistle. The grey treepie, a corvid, was a late riser, but hoodlum gangs soon made up for it. Layered over the top of all this came the screeches of sulphur-crested cockatoos. These aerial zoomers were a feral flock.

Whereas on Hainan island, in the Gulf of Tonkin in China’s south-east, birds are dinner served up by the Li people, a Chinese minority group:

The Li men jostle to sell me supper, all of it live: white-breasted waterhens, little egrets, a black-crowned night heron and a spot-billed duck, the only duck where male and female look alike. Upright, herons and their egret cousins have the gaunt, hunched air of sharp-eyed spinsters dressed for an Edwardian salon. Hung upside down, they turn limp, resigned to their fate except for the occasional mild jab at their captor’s hand.

Zhoushan has some very interesting things to say about the role of birds in Chinese society, much of it at odds with the popular, but apparently misconceived notion that wild birds are treated with the same reverence in Chinese society that they are accorded in Japan and some other Asian cultures.

In China, birds have seemingly been overwhelmed, like much of nature, by the demands of a rapidly growing and enriched society and the economic imperative.

Zhoushan refers to one early example of birds getting in the way of ‘progress’ and the likely effects of misguided policies:

In 1958 Mao Zedong had declared war on songbirds, sparrows in particular: he claimed they consumed scarce grain. For three days and nights my neighbourhood, gripped like much of northern China by hysteria, had beaten pots and pans to keep birds on the move until they collapsed in exhaustion on the roofs and pavements of the courtyard houses. The consequence was a plague of locusts the next year that helped bring on a famine. “Suan le,” Mao had said when told that the anti-sparrow campaign was not working. “Forget it then.”

Four decades after the campaign, sparrows remained scarcer in Beijing than they should have been (though they could reliably be found being grilled on bamboo skewers in the night markets, along with yellow-breasted buntings, meltingly sweet, in autumn).

China does not have a strong tradition of birdwatching and ornithological research – a disappointment in a country roughly the size of the continental USA and with a bewildering array of habitats and unmatched geographic and zoological diversity.

China is high on the ‘wish’ list of the world birdwatcher’s scale of countries to visit – with over 1,300 bird species and relatively high endemicity the country presents as a tantalising, but difficult, destination.

Fatbirder (don’t ask!) is a site dedicated to birders across the globe and the Fatbirder page dedicated to Chinese birding reflects the relatively low volume of birding travel to that country and interest in the study of bird within China. Fatbirder notes that:

Unfortunately, the pressure imposed by the huge population spells bad news for the wildlife; apparently nearly 8% of the country is set-aside as reserves, but this does not mean the areas are protected. Logging and hunting persist, the waterways are polluted beyond belief and much of the northeast is under threat of desertification as a result of merciless deforestation in the north. The government in Beijing has firm plans to do all it can to extend the protection of wildlife, but the recovery will be slow, and quite probably too late for some of the countries more vulnerable endemics.

If the possibility of amazing birds encourages you to get on a plane and discover the wonders yourself, the logistics of travel have to be considered. Even in the largest cities of Beijing and Shanghai, very little English is spoken, and once you are out in the countryside, a shouted “hello” is about all you will get. The prices for foreigners are often inflated, so be prepared to haggle, and even though the freedom of movement has improved tremendously in the last decade, some hostility and bureaucracy may still be experienced in more remote areas.

And while China seems, and is, a long way from Australia geographically, culturally and ornithologically, there are some very good reasons why Australian’s should be concerned about the fate of China’s birds and birding habitats in China and the rest of east Asia, particularly along the coasts.

The east-Asian – Australasian Flyway is a glorious thing – each year millions of shorebirds leave their breeding grounds in the Siberian and Russian Arctic and travel a precarious route along the coasts of east Asia, through south-east Asia and make landfall in northern Australia and beyond – later to disperse across the continent to a place near most of the readers of this post in Australia’s south-east.

As Wikipedia notes:

The East Asian – Australasian Flyway is one of the world’s great flyways. At its northernmost it stretches eastwards from the Taimyr Peninsula in Russia to Alaska. Its southern end encompasses Australia and New Zealand. Between these extremes the Flyway covers much of eastern Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, South-East Asia and the western Pacific. It is especially important for the millions of migratory waders or shorebirds that breed in northern Asia and Alaska and spend the non-breeding season in South-East Asia and Australasia. In total, the flyway passes through 22 countries with approximately 55 migratory species travelling along it, equating to about 5 million birds.

There are very real threats to the integrity of the east Asian – Australasian flyway – and they aren’t all in the countries to our north. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of governments here many of our wetlands have been, or are being, seriously degraded by poor agricultural practices and government policies that elevate the economic over the environmental.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in our greatest river system, the Murray-Darling – where many of what were semi-permanent wetlands are now dead or dying – their regular waters sucked away for paddocks and enpondments and their floodwater diverted for irrigation. For too many years in recent decades our visitors from the north have found the wetlands they have traditionalyy used for their necessary roosting and recharging en-route to and from Australia have been reduced to dust and dead trees.