Last Monday as I passed through Tennant Creek on my way to Alice Springs, I tuned into ABC local radio and heard Jordan Jenkins, owner of the Tennant Creek Hotel, let the cat out of the bag: Tennant Creek is addicted. 'I mean, we are not going to go bankrupt so police can present stats to people,' he said. And so the liquor licensees of the town are pulling out of an alliance with police designed to reduce alcohol related harm.
The statistics Jenkins referred to are police records of deaths, injuries, assaults, domestic violence, break-ins, motor vehicle crashes, drink driver apprehensions etc. — all markers of alcohol abuse, all heavily concentrated in the Aboriginal population of the town. The police have been ordered by the commissioner to reduce them as quickly as possible. But Tennant Creek liquor retailers argue that they have no choice but to resist the measures.
Jenkins' concern about going bankrupt seems reasonable. In our free entreprise economy entrepreneurs are entitled to operate businesses as long as they are legal and safe. And operating any sort of retail business in the middle of the Australian desert is always marginal, given the huge transport costs and a flakey tourist industry. No-one wants to see any family forced into bankruptcy.
Founded as a 'repeater station' on the Overland Telegraph in the 1870s, Tennant Creek achieved brief brilliance in the late 1920s when the discovery of gold led to a rush of fortune hunters. Today there are both successful and prospective gold mining and other mineral operations, and the Commonwealth Government hopes controversially to establish a nuclear waste dump 100km to the north, which will provide some economic benefits. These provide a fragile economic base to the region. They are all marginal.
The main reason Tennant exists today is as home for the Warramunga and other Aboriginal people of the Barkly tablelands region. Aboriginal people make up about 40 per cent of the 3000-strong population. And many of them drink a lot of alcohol. Whitefellas drink a great deal too, but usually frequent the membership clubs rather than the local pub. Alcohol retailing has become a basic industry.
For 30 years Aboriginal agencies, other non-Indigenous welfare bodies and the Northern Territory government have been trying to establish policies that will reduce the extreme levels of alcohol related injury and harm — which is also giving Tennant a bad name and so reducing the attractiveness of future