Jacinta blasts Gunner
SENATE candidate Jacinta Price has lashed out at Chief Minister Michael Gunner over the Alice Springs crime crisis, after her son’s car was targeted this weekend.
On Saturday, Ms Price revealed about 3am her son was woken by the sound of his car window being smashed and the car alarm ringing. In a post on social media, Ms Price addressed Mr Gunner, saying “start protecting us from crime the same way you brag about protecting us from Covid”.
Speaking to the Sunday Territorian, Ms Price said the incident had been reported to police and her family was left feeling “violated”.
“My son is pretty upset. He worked hard to buy his first car, now he has to fork out for the damages done to it,” she said.
“He works hard and he feels like he’s been trampled on and as for us as a family, we’ve always felt like we live in a safe enough street but it was also inevitable it was going to get to this point.
“We’ve just had enough, we’ve absolutely had a gutful of this throughout the NT and a gutful of it becoming so out of hand. It does not feel like it’s being dealt with properly and if it was, we wouldn’t be seeing this.”
Ms Price said the NT government needed to urgently
address child protection in order for the situation to improve. “This particular issue stems across so many areas and it starts with child protection,” she said.
“Politicians say these kids need their culture. There’s no evidence suggesting culture is going to rescue them. What is, is upholding their human rights.”
In a statement Police Minister Nicole Manison, who visited Alice Springs this week, said community safety in the region was a priority.
“There is no silver bullet to make all crime disappear overnight,” she said. “It takes hard, hard, constant work to achieve the generational change needed to break the cycles of disadvantage and dysfunction that lead to offending. That is what we are doing.
“We are tackling crime in Alice Springs with more police than ever before, more CCTV, more consequences for repeat offenders and more investment in youth to stop them turning to crime in the first place.”