Mission & Justice

Jamie Walker; 10/5/08

Having  worked on 50 Aboriginal land rights cases, anthropologist Peter Sutton says that time is up for the nation’s troubled indigenous communities. Professor Sutton, picking up on this week’s Mullighan report in South Australia, the latest to uncover rampant child sex crime in an Aboriginal homeland, said governments should withdraw funding rather than perpetuate the cycle of abuse. There was no future in “state-funded ghettos”, he told The Weekend Australian. Asked if they should be closed down, Professor Sutton said: “No, I am talking about withdrawing funds rather than actively closing them. The fact is they are artificial communities. If they were full of white fellas, no one would dream of propping them up just because the people say they want to stay there.

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Karlis Salna; 9/5/08

A retired Marist brother who has pleaded guilty to sexually abusing students in his care at a Canberra school has been likened to an alcoholic in charge of a pub. John William Chute, also known as Brother Kostka, has been charged with 19 counts of committing an indecent act with a child. The litany of charges relate to the abuse of six boys aged between 13 and 15 who were students at Marist College in Canberra between 1981 and 1987.

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Paige Taylor; 9/5/08

The WA state Government’s three-year overhaul of child protectionservices yesterday topped $500million and will include $112million over four years for more case workers in needy areas such as Aboriginal communities in the remote Kimberley. Within 12 months, an additional 210 child protection workers, service delivery workers and support staff will be deployed to the areas of greatest need.  At a cost of $5 million, remote community workers will be sent to Warmun and Oombulgarri in the East Kimberley.  “Following last year’s review of the former Department for Community Development, we made structural changes and invested significant further funding into protecting our children,” Treasurer Eric Ripper said. The budget allocation comes three months after West Australian Coroner Alastair Hope described the plight of Aboriginal children as “especially pathetic”.

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Paul Toohey; 8/5/08

Ted Mullighan came up with 46 recommendations to tackle child sex abuse in South Australia’s Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands. He might have stretched himself and made it 47.  The former Supreme Court judge exposed some seriously disturbing matters in his report. But there was one thing too unpleasant to touch: ending the permit system in those lands.  Mullighan would have done well heeding the words of 19th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham - words the judge probably knows because they relate to making sure the courts operate in the full public gaze.

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Jamie Walker & John Wiseman; 7/5/08

Former Supreme Court judge Ted Mullighan yesterday slapped down the option of federal intervention in South Australia’s troubled Aboriginal homelands, despite finding that at least one in seven children had been sexually assaulted. Mr Mullighan reported that child sex abuse on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands, adjoining the federal intervention zone in the Northern Territory, was “widespread, devastating and a national disgrace”. The inquiry found it likely that upwards of 14 per cent of the 1000 children living in the isolated communities had been raped or molested.

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6/5/08

Sunni extremists have killed three prostitutes and wounded two others in a brothel attack in the northern city of mosul, Iraqi police said on Tuesday. The insurgents knocked on the apartment’s door Monday and shouted at the women that they had been warned before not to carry out prostitution, said a police official, speaking on condition of anonymity. The militants then opened fire on the apartment, he said, citing testimony from one of the wounded women.

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Pia Akerman & John Wiseman; 6/5/08

Any move to extend the Mullighan Commission’s child sex abuse investigations into other Aboriginal communities in South Australia is set to face opposition from indigenous leaders. An indigenous community leader from the state’s southwest coast said it would be wrong to do so and would effectively brand all Aboriginal communities as “being sexual predators”. Kokatha Mula elder Bronwyn Coleman Sleep expressed her opposition to further investigations on the eve of commissioner Ted Mullighan’s report on child sex abuse on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands being tabled in the South Australian parliament.

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Chris Merritt; 6/5/08

Victoria’s plan to establish a separate county court to deal with Aborigines accused of serious crime raises the prospect of an apartheid-style legal system. Leading criminal lawyer Peter Faris QC, a former chairman of the National Crime Authority, said: “I saw this and felt sick.”  If the plan went ahead, it would open the door to “separate but equal” justice for Aborigines, the catchcry of apartheid South Africa, Mr Faris said. The plan, which will be outlined in today’s Victorian budget, will establish the nation’s first racially based court to deal with serious criminal offences.

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David Eames; 2/5/08

Religious radicals who attacked the top-secret Waihopai spy base more likely hampered New Zealand’s ability to drive a hard bargain at the trade table than crippled the US ability to wage war, says one intelligence expert. Peter Cozens, head of Victoria University’s Centre for Strategic Studies, says the mysterious Marlborough base is used strictly to collect and analyse information - often of “a political, trade and diplomatic nature” - for the New Zealand Government. Members of the Anzac Ploughshares movement infiltrated the base in an early-morning raid on Wednesday.

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John Wiseman; 5/4/08

Aboriginal leaders have called for perpetrators of child sexual abuse in remote indigenous communities to be prosecuted through the criminal justice system, rather than be subject to traditional codes of punishment, while demanding police take action to stamp out the problem. Leaders from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands, in northwest South Australia, have claimed that in the past, police have been “reluctant” to pursue offenders. Their position is outlined in a submission to the state’s Mullighan inquiry into child sexual abuse, whose report on abuse in the APY lands will be tabled in the South Australian parliament this week.

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