By Katharine Murphy
THE silent policeman is about to arrive in Alice Springs, much to relief of the town's mayor, Damien Ryan. It's been a difficult summer. Ryan admits the town he was born and grew up in has endured a rough few months. ''Security was not good here in November and December,'' he says, nursing a cup of tea in his sunny office.
I'm confused about this silent policeman. What can he mean? I don't want to be the clueless blow-in from Canberra;
I want to understand and feel I should, given that I grew up in a place not much bigger than Alice, another dry inland town, miles from the ocean.
Eventually I just ask. ''The silent policeman, Damien, what is that?''
''The winter,'' he says. He laughs when I'm obviously still mystified.
''People go inside,'' he explains.
As the mayor sees it, on balmy summer nights things get rowdy in Alice Springs, to put it mildly. But winter nights are cold. People stay indoors. Alice Springs calms down.
Problems hibernate but, unfortunately, they don't go away.
My cab driver has lived in Alice for 20 years. I'm not in the taxi three minutes when she asks me delicately if I know it's not safe to go out alone at night. Don't walk anywhere, she says, don't use an ATM, use the same precautions as you would in a rough suburb in the city.
I tell her I've read the reports of Alice being out of control, kids running amok, crime, violence, grog; I'd wondered if they were overblown. She shrugs. It's always been a bit dicey. ''Alice is a town where everyone is on the way to somewhere else. You've got to be careful, because you just never know who is in town.'' But it's worse at the moment, she says. The kids are wild. Not just the indigenous kids, some white kids, some islanders. She says a couple of local gangs recently had a competition to see how many cars they could steal in a night. There's no structure, no supervision, no adherence to the law. Politics has to be more than rhetoric, it has to follow through if Alice Springs is ever going to change. Kids and the parents have to take responsibility or take the consequences, she tells me firmly as she drops me at my digs by the Todd River.
''I'm here for a couple of days following Tony Abbott,'' I confess eventually.
She laughs cheerily. ''Ah, that's why they mowed the lawn.''
It's a wonderful place, Alice Springs. The culture is vibrant, the people friendly, but the town has taken a hit.
Alice Springs has borne the brunt of John Howard's emergency intervention. You see it in the number of indigenous people who have drifted out of remote settlements into the hubs to feed their addictions, or to seek treatment for a myriad of health problems.
Empty-eyed groups drift through the city during the day, some school-aged kids are in the park or the mall, not the classroom. Locals say the key to solving indigenous disadvantage is education: get the kids educated and lives will be transformed. But if the kids all went to school, as they are supposed to, then the system would collapse because it is not set up to deal with the real numbers.
There are listless congregations around the Todd River and surrounding streets. It breaks your heart.
The mayor doesn't mince his words. ''The intervention put an extreme amount of pressure on regional hubs like Alice Springs and Katherine. We, as a community, are paying the price.''
Alcohol-addicted residents are toying with the restrictions, drinking in pubs from 10am until 2pm, when they close, then hitting the takeaway outlets. Ryan is furious about the big retailers, Coles and Woolworths, and what he says is their lack of social responsibility. He's got local small businesses unhappy that welfare quarantining has sent all the business to the big chains. He runs a town awash with money, state and federal, but feels like the investments aren't properly co-ordinated.
Ryan has been described as ''hapless'' in some recent reports, but sitting across from him I don't see hapless; rather, a person weary of providing a captive backdrop for visiting politicians from Darwin and Canberra intent on scoring points.
This week, when I followed Abbott to Alice Springs, Ryan appeared focused on meaningful discussion, not a picture opportunity. The mayor would prefer not to be bypassed if the catch cry is consultation. Given that Alice Springs has felt the sharp end of the first intervention, Ryan is not turning cartwheels at the thought of another.
Abbott walked energetically into this battle this week. He's advocating a second intervention to deal with what he calls the ''gathering social dysfunction'' in Alice Springs.
The Opposition Leader's commitment in the area is genuine. He's won over people such as Warren Mundine, the former ALP president. Mundine admits he didn't used to like Abbott, but does now. He says Abbott is absolutely right in advocating for the intervention to continue. ''We have got to win this battle. We have to be realistic and stop pretending this is some racist attack on us.''
Abbott's call for intervention mark II is interesting in a couple of ways.
First, it's a mea culpa of sorts - Abbott admits the first emergency response under Howard was too top heavy and did not give enough ownership to community leaders. He's taking ownership of some of the deficiencies.
Second, it's an effort to be bipartisan. (Though we have to discount this slightly. Abbott knows full well that the more he takes strong public positions and initiatives, the more likely he is to back Julia Gillard into a corner. Prime ministers generally don't respond favourably to being counselled on their course of action by opposition leaders.)
This is one area of public policy where brute partisanship should be suspended in favour of getting a result. But will it happen, given the aggressive tenor of this Parliament and the enormity of this problem?
The government is ploughing money into Alice Springs. Execution could no doubt be better, but no one is sitting on their hands. Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin as has been characteristically forensic and stoic in the portfolio, and has attempted to excise the drama in the interests of one simple objective: to get things done.
But a trip to the centre of this country is, nonetheless, a confronting experience. Despite goodwill and best efforts, transformation is coming too slowly in Alice Springs, and change can't come quickly enough for the children of central Australia.
Katharine Murphy is national affairs correspondent.