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by Cris Cunneen
This article explores the issue of law and order and how the construction of a law and order agenda is manifested in particular communities. The following pages are concerned with the way in which the issue of law and order has been, and is being, used in north-west NSW as a means of defining Aboriginal people as a 'lawless' and 'problem' population in need of strong external state control. The focus of the article is the construction of law and order as a political issue by non-Aborigines, rather than a focus on Aborigines as a 'problem' population in need of intervention by state agencies, be they police or welfare workers. The purpose is not to evaluate the claims of a law and order crisis[1], but rather to demonstrate the way in which such notions of disorder come to be politically articulated and gain some level of credibility within parts of a community.
During the period 1984 to 1987 there were numerous public statements by local politicians, public meetings, parliamentary delegations and threats to establish vigilante groups in the north west of NSW over the issue of a perceived breakdown in law and order. The rural towns and cities which had been most vociferous in complaints about crime were also towns with a sizeable Aboriginal population, and in general it was Aboriginal people and young people who were blamed for the supposed crime wave'.
Late in November, 1985 a delegation from the north west region met with the NSW Premier and representatives from the Police Department and Attorney General's Department. One result of that meeting was that the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research was requested to conduct an inquiry into the claims of a 'law and order crisis'. Rather than 'measure' the already assumed criminality of Aboriginal people, the point at which the research began was to develop an understanding of the political power of the various law and order committees and groups in north west NSW. This was a political choice made in relation to conducting the research and was to have important implications. This section of the research was never published (until this summarised version here) because it was seen to be 'too political' and, by implication, not ameniable to an 'ameliorative' response from the state.
When the law and order delegation met with government representatives in November 1985 a number of substantive issues were raised concerning a 'crime wave' in the north west. The claims included the following: the 'crime wave' in one town could be attributed to 40 'hard-core criminals' of which 60 per cent were Aboriginal and 40 per cent were white; the 4,500 Aborigines in the area were mostly law-abiding but some had been recently 'stirred-up'; the police in several towns would not attend the scene of alleged crimes if they involved Aboriginal persons or juveniles; and there was a lack of police presence and proper policing. An example quoted for the lack of police presence by a Shire President related to an incident where a group of children mostly girls aged between 5 and 15 created a 'tremendous noise... barely 100 metres from the local police station without any police action being taken.'[2]
In addition to the points raised by the delegates at the meeting, a series of formal submissions were presented to the Premier. The submissions came from the various local Shires, and from individuals, business or other organisations. The Shire submissions covered a number of points in common which centred around the allegation that the police were frustrated because of the existence of laws which crippled their ability to act. In particular it was claimed that since the abolition of the Summary Offences Act the police had been confronted with "an alarming increase in the incidence of abusive language, indecent actions and gestures" (according to one Shire) which were alleged to have had a deleterious effect on community standards. There was seen to be a need for increased police strength. The courts were seen as failing to provide a proper level of deterrent because the prescribed level of fines or imprisonment were inadequate.
In addition to the Shires submissions, there were also a considerable number of private complaints and complaints from businesses and organisations concerning the question of law and order. Some of these complaints had been solicited by a leading member of the Law and Order Committee through public statements in the media requesting individuals to write to him detailing any complaints they may have had in relation to the administration of the criminal justice system[3]. The complaints were presented in the meeting by the delegation.
Many of the letters and complaints (including a petition from Dubbo) specifically mentioned Aboriginal people as a cause of the law and order problem. They tended towards extreme positions of racism and advocated a strong punitive response from the state. The petition (with 50 signatures) referred to the problem of the behaviour of 'certain people'. It stated, "We are not talking about the decent hardworking Aboriginals of the community." However the petition then immediately 'referred to the problem of a race of people'. The petition complained of the welfare benefits given to Aboriginal people. 'They are abusive, resentful, aggressive, lazy and they blame this attitude on the White Australians who took their land.' The petition was concerned at 'their (Aboriginal) breaking down of our community living'. 'We are sick and tired of their degenerate moral attitudes in the street, their deliberate flaunting of the law.' The solution offered in the petition was straightforward. 'Give them less handouts and more work, give the police more control in the streets for black and white, bring down more convictions and less legal aid.'
The belief that police were powerless to control the streets and to arrest Aboriginal offenders, either because of the lack of legislative power, inadequate staffing or because legal aid would "get them off', was a recurring theme in the letters concerned with complaints about Aboriginal people.
There was also considerable evidence of both the links between local business and the police, and the contributions the police made to the articulation of a more widespread law and order 'problem'. The following businessman's comment is exemplary:
Police I know and have spoken with are frustrated. It would seem they do their job and the court sentences and administration of sentences is minimal, to the point where the whole system is ludicrous and a sick joke.
Not surprisingly the solution to the problem offered in the submissions centred around stronger law enforcement and harsher penalties.
The most extensive submission came from a local Chamber of Commerce. The submission contained, amongst other material, a report from a meeting held on the 21st February 1985 which had been called by the Chamber of Commerce to discuss vandalism and crime. The meeting reiterated themes raised earlier in this chapter including the alleged lack of control brought about by the repeal of the Summary Offences Act and the view that legal aid (particularly Aboriginal Legal Services) should be abolished.
In addition, there were a group of letters which came from influential organisations (including solictors' firms and hospital administrations) in the region. In the opinion of one writer the solution to the problem of Aboriginal behaviour was a matter of policing. The main area of complaint concerned what the writer believed to be the lack of consistency in the application of the law. He stated, "there is a clear community opinion (which I support) that there is one law which applies to Europeans and another which applies to Aborigines ... It is widely rumoured that police have been instructed to not take up issues involving Aboriginal people and, whether or not that be so, it certainly appears that way". Another writer described Aboriginal people as 'louts', 'creatures' and 'breeds' which 'are just out of control' and allowed to run riot'. The writer blamed the Socialists' who were 'proceeding according to the principles of Lennin' (sic).
The belief that police could not arrest Aboriginal people, that in fact, Aborigines had some type of positive discrimination allowing them 'legal immunity' emerged as a dominant theme. The previous writers demonstrate clearly the types of implicit and explicit racism evident in the formulation of the 'law and order' debate. In particular the last letter is the expression of a position normally identified with the League of Rights, that is, that racial intermixing causes 'degenerate breeds' and the resultant disorder is used by communists and socialists to destabilise society in preparation for a revolution.
Taken together these various submissions, surveys, letters and petitions formed the documentary 'evidence' on which the call for an investigation into the supposed 'crime wave' in the north west was based. However before discussing the themes in the literature more fully, it is necessary to analyse the other component in the formulation of the law and order agenda which is the use made of public meetings.
Public meetings in country towns have played an important role in forging the 'populist' aspect of the law and order agenda. It is at such meetings that extreme measures can be proposed within the framework of a group of 'concerned citizens'. The first public meeting called by the Orana Law and Order Forum Committee was in September 1985. This meeting was held at the Dubbo Civic Centre with an estimated attendance of 2,000. The 'Law and Order Committee' addressed the meeting[4].
The first committee member (a retired police superintendent) stated that unless the standard of law and order was maintained the community would become a jungle. The committee member then played a speech made by Stalin in Moscow in 1935 to demonstrate who was behind the "forces of disorder". It was also an indication of support for the League of Rights position on race and disorder.
Another committee member (who was also the local National Party member) began his address to the audience in the following way:
It is less than 1 per cent of the population in our region who are the criminals responsible for the current situation... Are 99 per cent of our population going to continue to allow less than I per cent of our population to continue to terrorize our community or are we going to do something about it?
He told the meeting that as few as 40 people were responsible for the crime problem in the town. However because of 'new laws' police were powerless to deal with the problem. The courts and magistrates were ineffective because of weak laws.
The meeting was then opened to public debate. The first speaker wanted to know the names of the forty people. "If we've got 99 per cent of the people thats good and 40 people thats bad... then I suggest let their names leak out so we can watch them straight away. So let's know who they are and get on with the job." The second speaker said that legal aid should be abolished. After some discussion this was rephrased as a motion that legal aid should only be free if the person is found innocent.
The President of a local Shire, stated that most of the problems were caused by very few people and that "everybody knows who they are". Other speakers raised a number of issues which included the reintroduction of capital punishment, compulsory national service, etc. Other demands which were endorsed at the meeting included the introduction of legislation which allowed for evidence to be introduced in court by way of sworn affidavit with the suppression of the name of the witness; the lowering of the age of criminal culpability to children of the age of 8 years and above; and the introduction of provisions to make the parents of juvenile offenders personally liable for damages.
The types of claims made at the meeting show clearly the potential development of a vigilante response. The notion that 'crime' was committed by a few known (mainly Aboriginal) offenders gave rise to the seemingly rational response of 'let's know who they are'. The other familiar theme raised at the meeting was that communist agitation was the root explanation to all problems.
A second public 'Law and Order Forum' was held in Dubbo in February 1987 attracting a reported crowd of 2,000. There was considerable local publicity leading up to the meeting including the foreshadowed attendance of various State Parliamentary figures from the major political parties and numerous Shire representatives from the region. Some 22 demands were formulated by the meeting, however the bulk of these demands were the same as those formulated at the September 1985 meeting. At an organisational level it was interesting that the local Apex, Rotary and Lions' Clubs all supplied marshalls to assist the assembling and movement of the crowd which gathered. A noteworthy change from the 1985 law and order meeting was the attendance of the then Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Greiner, the then Opposition Spokesperson on Police, Mr. Pickering, the leader of the NSW National Party, Mr Wal Murray, as well as the attendance of the new District Superintendent of Police for Dubbo. Greiner's address to the audience reiterated themes around the issue that 'we have' 'gone soft as a society[5]'. Greiner also spoke of the supposed leniency shown towards Aborginal people by the criminal justice system:
You simply have to get rid of this system that says that there are different standards of laws for different people based either on their age or their colour or any other part of their background.
Greiner also thought the 'old system' of police discretion was the most suitable form of law enforcement:
There's nothing wrong with the old system where the police sergeant could plant his 'size 9s' in someone's back side if he thought that was the most appropriate thing to do. And he ought to feel confident that he can do that without in anyway jeopardising his own career. At the moment in NSW that's simply not the case.
Again the populist rhetoric at the meeting showed how easily the history of Aboriginal/police relations and repressive legislation could be lost within a supposedly rational discussion around crime'.
It is evident from the analysis of the 'law and order crisis' that relatively few themes run through the vast majority of complaints and submissions. Similarly a relatively small number of 'solutions' present themselves as being capable of controlling the crisis. The major claims are of 'disorder', of social breakdown and moral breakdown within the 'community'. It is a claim, in essence, that certain forms of behaviour are destroying the perceived moral fabric of society; and that there is a consensus on morality which can (and should be) enforced through the application of law. In this sense the claim of ' crisis' is profoundly political.
The division between 'crime wave' and 'social breakdown' is not a separation which is made by the claimants of the "crisis" view. Indeed to make that separation is to point to the break in the link between crime and more overtly ideological notions of order. The petition referred to previously complained about the (criminal) behaviour of 'certain people' yet slipped very quickly into describing the Aboriginal 'race' as 'abusive, resentful, aggressive, lazy'. The point concerning this statement is that, besides being racist, it is a description of behaviour which presumably has no application to the function of criminal law. Despite the comprehensive nature of the old NSW Summary Offences Act there was no section which made the alleged expression of resentfulness or laziness a criminal act.
Within the notion of the 'law and order breakdown' there is the implied and threatening consensus which separates 'us' the good, from the (Aboriginal/criminal) minority who are bad. Once the blame has been placed squarely on a minority group the "solution" becomes equally clear: control the troublemakers. And it is the 'solutions' which are offered which form the most dangerous part of the debate. After couching the terms of the problem in the most simplistic manner it seems clear that the only reasonable response should be to extend power over the minority group. The vigilante response of "give us their names and we'll do the rest', demonstrated by one individual at the law and order meeting, is in fact the logical conclusion to a debate argued in terms of social breakdown caused by a supposedly degenerate racial minority.
The response which emerges most clearly from the "crisis" is one built on the premise of exerting stronger control and achieving more complete isolation of the minority group. Formulated in terms of some cancerous growth. the remedy appears to be the removal of the cause of social disintegration. The punitiveness of the response: more police, stronger laws, longer gaol sentences, lowering the age of criminal culpability and adult responsibility, abolishing legal aid and effecting more convictions, all have as their, largely unspoken, raison d'etre the removal of the trouble-causing minority. The implied use of the criminal justice system in this punitive manner has deeply political ramifications. The whole notion of 'cleaning up the streets' in areas with large Aboriginal populations has a symbolic resonance which echoes moral and racial purity.
The purpose of analysing the claims of a 'law and order crisis' is to show how a particular social problem of 'law and order' has been constructed and generated. In addition particular interests (political parties, police and small business and property owners through the organs of local council and Chambers of Commerce) operate in the 'public sphere' to articulate a seemingly 'common sense' and populist view of crime which is at the same time profoundly political. While there has been no specific discussion in this article of any empirical evidence for the alleged 'loss of control of the streets' by police, any cursory glance at the statistics shows massive over-representation of Aboriginal people in police charges for street offences (for example, Cunneen and Robb, 1987). Far from the view that police should retain the discretion to plant a size 9 in someone's backside there is the reality of Aboriginal deaths in police custody, and there is the popular memory of the history of Aboriginal/police relations. As an Aboriginal woman, whom I interviewed in Bourke, simply stated:
I saw the police come to my house, we used to live in an old shack down the reserve, and drag my father out, and kick and kick and kick him. I saw that. I'm only 32 years of age and that's still on my mind ... My husband lived out at Wanaaring. They were told, my husband's mother and father were told to move their old tin hump), from where they had it. And they didn't because my father-in-law was out of town at the time. My mother-in-law was there with eight little kids. So the police came down driving a bulldozer and knocked the house on top of them. It didn't happen generations ago. We are still part of what happened. My husband was in that house when it was knocked down by the police.
(cited in Cunneen and Robb, 1987, p. 267)
For Aboriginal people this was the reality of life under the earlier 'strong public order legislation and 'welfare ... acts (such as the Aborigines Protection Act, which the advocates of the law and order campaigns yearn to reintroduce.
Far from the supposed 'consensus' on law and order, the evidence presented shows the role of local dominant interests in articulating and organising the law and order lobby. While the populist rhetoric which is used argues for a solution to the 'crime' problem it is clear that underlying such notions are calls for more authoritarian intervention to 'control' Aboriginal communities.
[1] An evaluation of the specific claims can be found in Cunneen, C., Robb, T., (1987) Criminal Justice in North-West N.S.W. N.S.W. Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, Sydney.
[2] The information is based on the Minutes of the meeting with the law and order representatives at Parliament House in November 1985. All further references in this section are drawn from either the minutes or the submissions which were tendered at the meeting.
[3] See, for instance, Daily Liberal 5 October 1984, p.3. The Daily Liberal is published in Dubbo. It is the only daily newspaper in the north-west region of N.S.W.
[4] The documentation for what actually occurred at the meeting is drawn from several sources: The official minutes of the meeting; the numerous newspaper reports which appeared in the Daily Liberal during the following week: ABC Television which taped the meeting and used various extracts in a number of radio and. television programmes including Countrywide, 30/10/85, (ABC TV) and Changes, 1/12/85, (ABC, Radio).
[5] The information and quotations from spokespersons at the meeting are taken from a tape of the meeting supplied by the Law and Order Committee.
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URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AboriginalLawB/1989/27.html