Teens and boys to be moved from Don Dale PM broadens abuse inquiry The line of teenage Aboriginal prisoners looked down in disbelief as the grey-haired priest with the large bowl of water moved along on his knees, delicately washing their feet, one by one.Jesus Christ washed the feet of the Apostles before the Last Supper and on Easter Thursday 2014 Bishop Eugene Hurley had two millennia of tradition behind him as he knelt before detainees at Darwin's Don Dale Youth Detention Centre."The year before, Pope Francis had washed the feet of refugees and asked who wept for them," Hurley recalled. "On Monday night I think around Australia a lot of people were weeping for these kids."The ABC program Four Corners exposed just how the Northern Territory's juvenile detention system had degenerated into venal brutality and corruption: Australia's collective conscience was seared by footage of teenage detainees sprayed with tear-gas; of 17-year-old Dylan Voller shackled to a restraining chair by his wrists, ankles and head, a "spit hood" obscuring his face; of prison guards who were "cage fighters"; of the prison minister roaring off astride a Harley-Davidson juxtaposed with his own department's torture videos.Overnight the Northern Territory became Australia's shame.Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull moved within hours and by Thursday had appointed former territory chief justice Brian Ross Martin to head a royal commission looking into the failings of the child protection and youth detention systems.  
He is to report by   March 31.Turnbull's rush to judgment alienated many Aborigines.The Northern and Central Land councils and the Aboriginal Medical Services Alliance NT say they are bitterly disappointed that the Prime Minister ignored their request to be consulted about the terms of reference and utterly reject Martin as royal commissioner.AMSANT deputy chair Olga Havnen said Martin, who presided over the Snowtown trial in South Australia and the Peter Falconio murder case in the territory, was not independent and still on territory government payroll."As chief justice, he sat at the apex of the NT's justice system. He presided over all judicial officers who sentenced young Aboriginal offenders to detention, and he knew them all; he himself sentenced juveniles to detention," she said.The Russian chronicler of crime and punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, famously wrote in his novel on Siberian prison camps The House of the Dead, "The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."Dostoevsky was writing around 1862, but the novel also presciently captures the Northern Territory 2016: "Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is habit; it has its own organic life; it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate ... the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible."Locking up Aboriginal people has become a form of tyranny in the territory. The per capita imprisonment rate of 843 per 100,000 is the highest in the world. (Australia's national rate, based on 2014 figures, is 187). The territory easily eclipses the US imprisonment rate of 714.But the raw penal statistics hide an obscene racist and racial bias that lurks in the territory while attesting to the absolute failure of the government's gung-ho law and order policies.Twenty-five years ago, when the royal commission reported into 99 deaths in custody, 69 per cent of the territory's prison population were Aboriginal. It has now risen to 90 per cent.Juvenile prisoners' numbers have skyrocketed 70 per cent in the last decade. Ninety-eight per cent of juveniles in detention are Aboriginal.On Thursday, 34 youngsters were locked up in the Don Dale Centre 20 kilometres south of the Darwin CBD. On any given day, 60 per cent of them have not been sentenced but are simply behind bars awaiting trial.In a land won to profit by muscle, brutality and technology, there is no room for softness. White society in the territory has always decided what was best for the Aboriginal people: they took away their children, they decided Aborigines were better off without missions and missionaries, they decided to stop them living in remote communities, they decided on an intervention. They drowned them in alcohol, little wonder after two lost generations the kids are still frying their brains petrol sniffing.The Aboriginal boys at my primary school for the Rum Jungle uranium town, sout of Darwin, all died before 25, killed drunk in road accidents or beaten to death in jail after the 1967 referendum allowed them to drink and drive like the rest of Australia.Since self-government in 1978, Aboriginal voters have tended towards Labor but in recent years the Country Liberal Party assiduously reached out to remote communities and attracted unprecedented votes from Aborigines. The icing came in 2013 when a coup installed Adam Giles as Chief Minister, the first Indigenous person to head a government. His father is descended from the Kamilaroi people in the NSW Hunter; he was the great black hope of Aboriginal Territorians.But Giles ignored them, championing the mining industry and development at all costs, he rammed through fracking legislation two weeks ago, in the dying days of Parliament - Territorians go to the polls on   August 10. Playing on people's fears of robbery and violence, law and order became his abiding mantra. The local media all went along for the ride.A new $1.8 billion (Labor-commissioned) super jail opened in   September 2014. Giles legislated use of the restraining chair for youngsters with the Orwellian-sounding Youth Justice Amendment Bill last   April. Even this week, as Four Corners tore through its credibility, the CLP government came out with a $14 million pork barrel promise of 105 extra police auxiliary officers with new powers to patrol bottle shops, public transport and housing commission areas.In police operation Trident, aimed at petty offenders, officers carry out bail checks six times a night and police stations are wallpapered with photographs of young offenders accused mainly of property offences.Giles heads a government that looks increasingly clownish: he survived an abortive and comical counter coup, a sports minister who texted videos of himself masturbating to a female constituent, and a corrections minister, John Elferink, astounded an audience at a public forum on young offenders at Don Dale when he spoke lengthily about being sexually abused as a boy.Elferink had announced his retirement at the election. Giles dumped him from corrections in the wake of the Don Dale scandal but inexplicably retained him as Attorney-General and Children and Families Minister. Together, the pair have turned government in the Northern Territory into a sort of sad sideshow much the same way that the ultimately failed persecution of Lindy Chamberlain by authorities in the 1980s made Paul Everingham's CLP government a byword for redneck stupidity.With defeat threatening, former and current CLP politicians have lined up to kick Giles.Among them was former 1980s chief minister Ian Tuxworth who, unearthed in Perth, opined how Giles and co. thought they were above the law. The last time Tuxworth was spotted, he was touring Australia on taxpayers' money warning of the consequences of turning ownership of Uluru to Aborigines in 1985.Even the NT News newspaper, historically a CLP cheerleader, temporarily ditched its crocodile tall tales and ran a stark front page on Wednesday shouting "SACK THE LOT OF THEM".The horrific video and interviews with the victims afforded the Four Corners program the extra bite that proved a seismic moment in Australian race relations. But many of the facts have been well known around Darwin since 2014.The Don Dale Centre had been operating since 1991 when North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency law and justice manager Jared Sharp was shocked seeing boys in isolation during a visit in   August 2014 and complained. A riot followed, there were numerous escapes - including a joyride and ram-raid on the centre by returning escapees."I think it just became too embarrassing for the major players," Sharp told Fairfax Media. "These kids humiliated the corrections minister and the prison commissioner and the response has been to get tougher and tougher and tougher ... they went out of the way to recruit bouncers for guards."Reports cascaded from NT's Children's Commissioner, Colleen Gwynne, her predecessor Howard Bath, former manager of Long Bay Jail in NSW and Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, Michael Vita. Bath's report included a transcript of the tear-gas episode.In   June last year, Sharp went public telling an open forum the detainees were "caged up like animals".On   December 1 last year Supreme Court Justice Peter Barr upheld an appeal by guard Derek Tasker against a conviction of aggravated assault in 2010 on Voller, then 13, at an Alice Springs detention centre. The justice found Tasker, trained in "professional assault", had used reasonable force on Voller. Now in adult detention, Voller has reportedly been charged with some 50 offences over the years.The ABC and the NT News fulsomely recorded all these events but curiously Giles and Northern Territory Senator Nigel Scullion, federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, feigned surprise at the Four Corners revelations.Darwin barrister John Lawrence, SC, made a telling contribution to the program. His chambers feature a drawing of Karl Marx, a football jumper signed by Diego Maradona, an old photograph of Edinburgh's Grassmarket and a Viet Cong poster. Born in Scotland, he completed law at Melbourne university, came to Darwin to complete his articles on the Chamberlain case and has been a forceful advocate of Aboriginal justice ever since."That photograph of that kid sitting in the f---ing chair ... That mechanical device legislation is poison," Lawrence said."We are not the same as we were 20 years ago. We put up with more shit. We're all 'good Germans' now."How we treat Aboriginal men, women and children in jail is the first thing people will now think of when it comes to the territory. Right up there with crocodiles and cyclones. That's our new 'brand'," he said. "Thankfully the country is responding in a human way to what is an inhuman situation."History will judge how Australia treats Aboriginal people and compare us with New Zealand, Canada and we'll be at the bottom, we've been at the bottom from the beginning."Hurley said the urgent need was to involve Aboriginal communities in the royal commission."The more I live here and have the privilege of working with Aboriginal people it becomes clearer to me that I don't know the answers," he said."What we saw the other night was the arrogant and brutal betrayal of a sacred trust."It's time we stopped pontificating on what's good for the Aboriginal people. It's time we had the decency to relentlessly listen to the needs of Aboriginal people."They know what they need. They have a family structure that is sacred, they know what is required, if we are serious about being helpful the first thing we must do is listen, and not just with our ears but listen with the ears of our heart. "Can you image what the young men and boys will be like in five years time after enduring those events in Don Dale? We have to heal them before we can expect anything of them."When Four Corners went to air, a 14-year-old sat in the Don Dale Centre after being arrested the previous Thursday.On home detention on another matter, police kept him in custody for nine hours before bail was granted. But they left him in a cell for another three hours. At 12.30am, he kicked the cell door in frustration.Police charged him with willful damage and he was sent the Don Dale Centre.Sharp was appalled and said systemic issues should have raised the alarm but jail is the first stop in a law and order culture that values the ethos of the bouncer over social workers to care for miscreant youngsters."This is a kid who had previously been brutalised by staff at Don Dale," Sharp said. "This week they put him in solitary."