Recently in Perth, Carl Morrison, a 12-year-old Aboriginal passenger in a stolen car driven by his 14-year-old friend, was killed when the vehicle crashed after being pursued by police. Premier Geoff Gallop, rather than leaving the family to their grief, moved to exonerate the police and to blame the parents. ‘The issue wasn’t about the police chase. The issue yesterday was about those youngsters stealing the cars and then going on a joy-ride when they should have been at school.’ Western Australia is in the grip of a moral panic about delinquent youngsters, particularly from Indigenous backgrounds, hanging around in public places. A moral panic was defined famously by British sociologist Stanley Cohen as:
A condition, episode, person or group emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnosis and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes visible.
The curfew introduced for Perth’s entertainment district of Northwood, and the current policing of Aboriginal youth in Perth, can be seen as part of the process of moral panic.
In the face of evident public support for Gallop’s uncompromising response, relatives and friends of Carl Morrison struggled valiantly to humanise the children. His family had just moved into a government home after years of homelessness. He had a disabled sister. He had recently learned to read. He loved art and soccer. Loved his family. His father said, ‘Me and my wife have eight kids and we try our best with them’. But Gallop was implacable: ‘I’m a strong supporter of reconciliation … but what happened in the past is no excuse for this sort of behaviour, and I think it should be described for what it is—it’s bad behaviour, it’s offensive behaviour, it’s putting the youngsters at risk, it’s putting the broader community at risk and we need to confront it and deal with it.’ (The Sunday Times, 22 August 2003) He found common ground with John Howard by declaring that history could not be held up as an excuse for contemporary Indigenous social problems and criminality.
One of Gallop’s lieutenants, Michelle Roberts, took up the cudgels against the driver, a boy with a history of