GARY HIGGINS: Multi-pronged approach needed to fit the Territory’s itinerant problems

NO one wants Darwin to become the capital city of missed opportunity, but we need not look far beyond the street to see just how bad the current environment is.

Locals, visitors and businesses alike are all affected.

Public drunkenness and anti-social behaviour harms business, threatens our safety and detracts from everything that makes the Territory great.

Itinerants doing the wrong thing can lead to more serious crime, including break-ins and assaults.

The first part of the solution is to enforce the laws that we already have – this includes making sure police are fully supported in using paperless arrests and other measures to remove problem drunks and troublemakers from the streets. Of course, this requires police to be properly resourced and strategically placed to adequately deal with problems.

I have always supported the expansion of facilities at Berrimah to deal with problem drinkers. However, like the BDR, a sobering-up shelter alone is not a silver bullet.

It will not solve the problem on its own.

If the Labor Government was serious about solving the problem of itinerants and problem drunks, they wouldn’t have cut $8 million from the Alcohol and Other Drugs funding in the last budget and they would have kept Alcohol Mandatory Treatment, which did make a difference.

However, not all itinerants face the same issues. Some are simply people that have ended up in the city to visit the hospital, family or other services for a short period of time.

A lack of affordable shortterm accommodation means that sometimes they end up without a place to stay.

Providing short-term accommodation to itinerants – those that are doing the right thing – with a safe place to stay would improve the safety and appearance of the CBD.

It would also make it easier to identify people that should be receiving treatment for alcohol or drug issues.

Bagot community makes sense as the location for a facility like this, because it was used many years ago for this purpose. The site of such accommodation is less important than ensuring the government provides sufficient funding and support for those services.

The services need to be accessible to encourage participation and properly resourced to be effective in keeping people on the straight and narrow.

Accommodation and services of this type should not be entirely paid for by government either, instead Centrelink payments would be collected to pay for security costs, meals, provision of services and defray capital costs.

More than that, we should be seeking to address the root causes of people travelling to Darwin in the first place.

We should be improving remote health and other services in the bush, so that people can remain in community, rather than travelling to Darwin for treatment or to visit government offices. This would avoid the problem of people becoming “stuck” in Darwin and living on the street.

Improved infrastructure in communities would mean people have less need to come to Darwin and, when they do, they can get back home easily.

This would be a better government spend than on a museum.

The worst thing we can do is to continue complaining about the problem, yet do nothing constructive.

Darwin is the jewel of the north and it needs to be presented as such.

The CBD is often the first introduction for visitors and it should accurately reflect all of the great things that the NT has to offer.

Gary Higgins is the Leader of the Opposition.