On the rare occasions that the left chatterers even bother to admit that Aboriginal women and children suffer shocking rates of domestic violence, the last thing they’ll do is honestly confront the root cause: traditional Aboriginal culture.
The same traditional culture which, as Jacinta Price points out, empowers tribal ‘big men’ to brutally dominate women.
A respected Alice Springs traditional owner and director of a community organisation tasked with stamping out domestic and youth violence in the crime-ravaged outback city beat his long-term partner in an alcohol-fuelled assault earlier this year.
Lhere Artepe Aboriginal Corporation chair and Tangentyere Council director Benedict Stevens was handed a six-month suspended sentence in June after pleading guilty to aggravated assault following a violent incident in which he struck his partner in the head with a traditional Aboriginal foraging tool and left a large gash.
At the same time, this violent hypocrite has been lauded as a ‘community leader’ – and showered with other people’s money.
Northern Territory Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro met with Mr Stevens as part of a trip to Alice Springs last week following a huge escalation in violent crime that saw a baby left with a fractured skull after an alleged home invasion and a woman allegedly raped in her sleep.
The Australian understands in the week leading up to pleading guilty, Mr Stevens performed a Welcome to Country for the televised Melbourne v Fremantle AFL game in Alice Springs.
At the same, Stevens is trousering plenty of taxpayer dollars for – believe it or not – counselling other Aboriginal men about domestic violence.
The federal government committed $2m to a “Women’s Voices” campaign at Tangentyere Council last year, and has committed $1.25m in the past two years alone for family and domestic violence support.
Mr Stevens is one of 14 directors at the Tangentyere Council, where he has been involved in domestic violence diversion programs.
You couldn’t make this stuff up. What’s the old saying about mechanics and their cars?
Asked whether it was appropriate for him to be counselling other men on domestic violence, he said: “Yep.”
No doubt he’s got plenty of tips on the best techniques.
In the wake of the assault, Mr Stevens volunteered to stand down as the Alice Springs Hospital’s Aboriginal Liaison Officer, he said. He maintains what happened was “an accident”.
Sure: she walked into the digging stick by accident.
Multiple members of the Alice Springs Indigenous community slammed Mr Stevens for remaining on the Lhere Artepe board despite the incident, and have said it was an “open secret in the black community”.
“Why is somebody with serious domestic violence convictions sitting at the top of the food chain when you’ve got the (police) commissioner and Chief Minister talking about domestic violence in the town?” one person said.
Another said: “The Territory can’t have DV offenders as leaders, we’re a laughing stock.”
No, just a grimly typical example of ‘Big Men’ and the ongoing brutality of traditional law.
The following quote can be found under the chapter titled Marriage Law of the Ngarra Law written by Yolngu elders: “When a promised bride has reached sexual maturity her promised husband may take her for his wife. A 40 or 50-year-old man has spent his life learning the Ngarra law. His new wife might only be 13 to 16 years old and she will be sexually mature but she will not know much about the law. Yet when she marries him, she has the right to learn from him all the law that he knows that took him a lifetime to learn. But if she breaks the marriage law she must be speared through the leg. If the husband does not want to punish her then her mother or brother or sister will punish her, perhaps by hitting her with a heavy nulla nulla.”
Read that again, if your mouth isn’t already hanging open.
Yet, this is the tribal law that activist judges want to be held as equal to the Common Law.
