She cared for her nephew who was very ill. He had downsyndrome and died 18 months ago at the age of 13 from peronititis. Treatemnt had to be withdrawn to allow this boy to die. none of the men in the family would make the decision to stop his suffering, scared they would be seen as responsible for his death. They made her make the decision. She told me she knew what had to be done and knew what would happen to her once he died.

Thankfully we avoided her having to make the decision as between RDH and other factorsd, he was allowed to pass and she did not have to be seen to have made the call…. Read more

She also cares for her violent husband who has a mental illness. She is also one of the main people in the community who interprets on court days and is sort after by the police and defence.

She is not a criminal. She is not a grog runner. She does not sell alcohol in restricted area’s for money. She does not bring alcohol into restricted area’s. She is the scape goat for other family members. I have taken this woman to conferrences in Sydney for national seminars where she was an invited guest, as she cared for a very ill boy in one of the more remote communities in Australia. She represented one of the most marginalised disability carers in the country.

She has always held down a job and has worked hard in her community and has supported her family and others when others in the community have failed.

You should remove her from your blog. It is uncalled for and does not represent the true facts about this person or circumstances.

Yes it does, when the community in that area requests the dry status and supports it. That makes all the difference from an unwanted nanny state being imposed by a distant government.

For the most part, enforcement of dry areas has been so successful that there are now more Aboriginal than non-Aboriginal teetotallers per capita in Australia. This, despite the handicap of tens of thousands of years without alcohol leading to an apparent increased susceptibility to the stuff, is a major achievement deserving the full support of the law — where the local community requests it.

While I sympathise with communities that want the problems of alcohol removed, this will not be achieved through simplistic law enforcement approaches focused on supply control. The only way to really achieve a change in the level of alcohol use is to focus on demand reduction - that is, treatment options in the short term and economic and social development in the longer term.

Supply control approaches in remote communities are increasing harm - both health related harms as people seek out stronger forms of alcohol or binge drink when the opportunity presents itself - and personal harms as domestic and sexual violence is increased.

As in all these matters there is an important economic issue here - why use an expensive tool to crack what is a relatively small nut - I’ve just spent a month in Arnhem land and I have formed the firm view that there is far less ganja and similar drug use in central Australian than there is in the Top End.

And are you being disingenuous in suggesting tht the NT Police don’t have these powers in relation to dog and house etc searches? Of course they do. But, these powers, as of course they should be, are subject to the constraints and protections of the criminal law.

And, as in all things, there is also a question about what the “optimum” number of police. Who decides how many police go where? And why? Do we really need all of the remote townships in the NT swamped with Police officers twiddling their thumbs?

Dr John Howard from the National Cannabis Prevention Centre is one of the speakers at a national drug and alcohol conference being held in Darwin today.

He says a Federal Government report showing that alcohol and drug incidents in Territory communities have risen since the intervention highlights that simple bans are not dealing with the problem…”But I think that in many places where we allow a sense of hopelessness, or it’s all too hard, to occur, why wouldn’t you want to medicate yourself somehow to get through a day.”

I talked further about this over at The Northern Myth post earlier today. And as Bob and anyone else with experience in the centre and elsewhere in the NT would know - roadblocks etc can be pretty ineffective in stopping grog, ganja, kava etc

The confiscation of vehicles is not a good mechanism to rely on, as grog and drug runners often borrow or steal vehicles belonging to innocent third parties. Recently at some communities there has been a trend to dupe or compel female relatives to drive such vehicles as a further buffer to harsh penalties applying to the real offenders.

Police and magistrates are often placed in invidious positions when trying to deal with these cases under the present legislation, and police sometimes seem to choose to press lesser charges under the Commonwealth provisions and thus risk providing unintended encouragement to the main offenders, rather than causing innocent parties to lose their vehicles.