Western Australia’s top police officer has invoked a controversial cartoon by the Australian’s Bill Leak as an accurate reflection of parental neglect in response to continuing troubles in Kalgoorlie.
Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan said it took police in Kalgoorlie 12 hours to find a responsible adult to take care of a 10-year-old boy, who has been charged, along with four others, over an alleged break-in at Kalgoorlie-Boulder community high school and Eastern Goldfields college last week.
O’Callaghan told the West Australian on Thursday that Leak’s cartoon depicting Indigenous parents as feckless, which is being investigated on racial vilification grounds by the Australian Human Rights Commission, “reflected” what police regularly saw in dysfunctional Indigenous and non-Indigenous families.
The child in question was not Indigenous. It is not clear whether the police chief was aware of that or not.
The head of the Aboriginal Legal Service of WA, Dennis Eggington, said he was “dismayed” by O’Callaghan’s “assumptive, hurtful and ignorant” comparison to the Leak cartoon.
“This sickening stereotype promotes blaming and shaming of all Aboriginal people and further alienates our children from the police service in particular and the wider community in general,” Eggington said.
“To all the hardworking, loving Aboriginal parents across Western Australia, I commend your resilience in being strong role models for our children in the face of constant struggles you encounter on a daily basis. To all the hardworking, loving non-Aboriginal parents across Western Australia who work, recreate and struggle alongside us, I commend you also.”
He said O’Callaghan should seek “solutions rather than scapegoats”.
Kalgoorlie has been beset by racial tensions after the death of a 14-year-old Indigenous boy erupted into a riot last month.
O’Callaghan also told the West Australian that children should be removed from negligent parents, at least until the problems are addressed.
“If they are left in those environments while people are trying to deal with the families and things like substance abuse and alcohol abuse ... those kids are still running amok in the community, creating havoc ... and getting in trouble with the law,” he said.
The damage at Kalgoorlie-Boulder high school caused damage worth $100,000 and forced the school to close for a day.
O’Callaghan told Fairfax Radio in Perth that trying to find a responsible adult was a frequent problem for police arresting children in WA, which has the highest rates of Indigenous youth incarceration in the country. According to a report by Amnesty International, Indigenous children aged between 10 and 17 in WA were 53 times more likely to be jailed than non-Indigenous children, twice the national rate of racial disparity.
“Sometimes you take them to a place and the adults are not capable because they are affected by either alcohol or drugs or both,” O’Callaghan told 6PR.
“In the case of Kalgoorlie, when the father [of the 10-year-old boy] was approached, he wasn’t interested in taking care of him. So we couldn’t leave him with the father … [He] wasn’t interested in having anything to do with him.”
This week, the mayor of Kalgoorlie-Boulder, John Bowler, suggested considering a return to corporal punishment.
“Do you want to give him a couple of cuts with the cane?” Bowler told Seven News. “I reckon a lot of parents would say: give him the cane and hopefully that will stop him doing what he’s doing.”
That prompted the premier, Colin Barnett, to reassure reporters in Perth that the government of Western Australia would not be re-introducing corporal punishment.
Barnett and O’Callaghan will attend a summit in the outback town next week to address concerns of growing violence in the community.
