What can you honestly say about a community so steeped in violence and abuse that its teachers need security fences to safeguard their lives?
These are the same communities where STDs in children are endemic, domestic violence rampant – and where five year-old boys are gang-raped by other children.
But it’s all the gummint’s fault, of course.
An attack on a young school teacher at her home in the remote Queensland Indigenous community of Lockhart River has led to allegations the state government put staff at risk in unsafe housing. Rachel Middleton, 25, was allegedly slashed across the face and stabbed in the abdomen during a frenzied night-time attack on Tuesday by Michael Ronald Giblet, who was arrested on Wednesday, after he had come to her home to ask for water.
Ms Middleton was flown out of the Cape York community early on Wednesday and was being treated at Cairns Hospital for serious injuries to her face, arms, legs and stomach.
Local sources involved with the school have told The Australian that complaints had previously been made about the “sub-standard” housing and severe lack of security for teachers. The teachers’ accommodation had only a waist-high fence that had been removed recently as some were undergoing renovations.
Teachers shouldn’t need security to live in the communities where they work.
The town’s mayor, Wayne Butcher, blamed the alleged attack in part on an influx of “sly grog” into the 800-strong community in recent months that had been fuelled by extra money from COVID relief programs such as JobSeeker.
“Rachel is a beautiful person,’’ Mr Butcher said. “Car loads of alcohol are coming into the community because people have extra money — it is damaging the community. Domestic violence is going through the roof and now this has happened.’’
In August, Cape York leader Noel Pearson said the COVID measures were behind a surge in “grog chaos and gambling” in vulnerable communities.
Of course. It’s got nothing to do with communities where violence and abuse at each other’s hands are commonplace. It’s always someone else’s fault.
It’s not as if this sort of violence and mayhem were par for the course long before COVID.
In 2008, a nurse was raped by an intruder on remote Mabuiag Island in the Torres Strait more than a year after the then Bligh Labor government was warned that her accommodation and that of others in the region lacked basic security[…]
[Queensland Teachers Union president Kevin] Bates said after then-Aurukun principal Scott Fatnowna was attacked with an axe in 2016, all teachers were evacuated and a multi-million-dollar compound was built for them.
Yet, instead of addressing such grievously dysfunctional communities and the violence and abuse that too many Aboriginal women and children have to live with every day, not to mention those trying to help them, “Aboriginal” parliamentarians like the Greens’ Lydia Thorpe babble woke garbage like “the climate crisis…economic inequality…and for a Treaty”.
Far easier to preach to bourgeois suburban Greens voters than actually do something to fix remote communities, I guess.
But then, you can’t help those who don’t want to be helped.
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