Drinker bans in FNQ won’t solve problem
THE recent intervention by the Mayor of Cairns and some councillors admitting that local government does have a shared responsibility and role in providing a safe and welcoming community for residents and visitors alike is long overdue.
That however is the end of the good news as the proposition that a banned drinkers register will do the trick is nonsense as alcohol is all too easy to obtain and plentiful and only addresses one part of the problem and lawlessness abounds elsewhere.
There are two issues to be addressed simultaneously.
The first is the level and frequency of juvenile lawlessness occurring primarily in the inner suburbs but now disturbingly ranging from the northern beaches to Gordonvale and beyond.
There is genuine fear in a growing cohort of people particularly the elderly, that they are not safe day or night, and effectively live a life of fear with a baseball bat beside their beds.
Equally there are growing numbers of young families who live with the fear of being rolled by opportunistic night time intruders seeking keys to cars, mobile phones, cash, computers and other movable items.
They are the “untouchables” who have “lacked wraparound support from early childhood” and are further excused for their mayhem because “they need more understanding and more things to occupy them”.
This is rubbish of course and they need to be removed from our streets, backyards and homes to appropriately staffed and resourced State Government diversionary facilities where a variety of interventions can be applied under approved programs so they might be rehabilitated.
The empty 16 HA Alluna Hostel at Hartley Street, Portsmith, is ideally located for that purpose and with some ingenuity and vision could be repurposed to do the job.
The Cairns Regional Council needs to endorse the State Government’s reintroduction of the Breach of Bail Legislation and facilitate such an outcome as they should with Quigley Street for domestic violence victims.
The second issue is the one of inner city and public space lawlessness consisting of young roaming bands of miscreants, often drug and chroming-affected, terrifying the living daylights out of CBD residents and visitors alike and the other are groups of often drunken itinerants who are afforded easy access to alcohol.
This is now spreading to the northern beaches and many of these displaced are from northern ATSI communities. This issue requires the proactive involvement of the Cairns Regional Council by firstly deploying a bylaw banning the consumption of alcohol without a permit in all CRC controlled parks, footpaths and public spaces.
The prime suspect spaces and hot spots are easily identified and need regular patrols and action taken to confiscate alcohol and enforce move on provisions for illegal, abusive and anti social behaviour.
This needs to be resourced via a CRC private provider security contact working collaboratively with the QPS.
Despite a public commitment in August 2022 to headquarter the QPS Aboriginal Liaison Officers in the Esplanade office with regular foot patrols in the CBD, little has occurred.
If you deny the space for drinking and obnoxious behaviour to occur then in time you will win the war as this community discovered in 1993 when a group of 84 hardcore antisocial disruptors and law breakers accepted voluntary repatriation to Lockhart River as no quarter was afforded them on the streets and parks of Cairns when they broke the law.
The problem disappeared overnight.
There is no shortage of failed studies and interventions that have been conducted in the CRC in the past 40 years except for the 1993 Cairns City Council intervention.
They always fail when collective community leadership avoids the hard issues and fails the community for which they were elected to serve.
Kicking the can down the road under the guise of a Banned Drinkers Register fails us all.