Political and media vultures done with Alice Springs 'youth crime' panic

The political and media class have siphoned the opportunity and money out of the Alice Springs 'youth crime' moral panic and have now moved on, writes Tom Tanuki.

YOUTH CRIME in Alice Springs isn’t useful for Canberran vultures anymore. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton sucked the blood he needed out of the town in late January when he invited Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to “go see what it’s like”.

That’s what politicians use Alice for whenever they need it for something. They dress up in something nice and rugged, attire that suggests they’ve been rolling the red earth around in their hands and surveying the horizon. They shoot some footage there telling their opponents to “go see what it’s really like”. (Go and stare at Northern Territory Indigenous people, is what they mean.)

Dutton intended to undercut a debate about the Voice to Parliament with this tried-and-tested trick. (There’s a whole host of problems with the Voice, including many which Indigenous people continue to raise before a nation of deaf ears. Nonetheless, this was Dutton’s intention.)

It worked for him. By mid-February, he was telling a working group that the referendum is on track to defeat. So that’s it, really. The political football game of Alice Springs youth crime served its purpose. It can be laid to rest until decontextualised Indigenous pain is once more useful to some prick in Canberra.

Youth crime has become a bore for Canberra’s attendant media beat-up pack, too. They obediently created a moral panic around young Black criminals when it suited Dutton. Now that it doesn’t, they aren’t talking about it anymore:

Articles covering Alice Springs, January-February 2023 (Source: muckrack.com)

Alice Springs coverage peaked on 24 January, when Dutton first kicked it off. It was revived in late January when hard conservative commentators like 2GB’s Ben Fordham, Sky’s Peta Credlin and News Corp’s Frank Chung found an “outback nurse” on Facebook to pretend she had experience working with sexually abused Indigenous children in Alice Springs. But essentially, it’s by now reverted to pre-moral panic levels.

What is the audience of full-time racists – that nationwide bloc of dedicated White supremacist mouth-foamers who are chiefly served by moral panics like those cultivated around Alice Springs – to do now? Where are they to get their anti-Black content from, now that it’s temporarily become less useful for News Corp and Canberra to bottle-feed it to them?

After all, they are now no longer being served by Action for Alice, a page that curated Black people doing illegal things on camera across the nation. It was recently removed by Facebook. (Its administrator, baker Darren Clark, must now get back to baking lamingtons for grant money.)

Enter Avi Yemini, who is chiefly funded by serving racists for money. Avi’s been touring around Alice Springs with his Rebel News crew of “independent media” germs, filming Black people and decontextualising interview clips, as is his trade. He’s been asking them if they “know Lidia Thorpe”, which apparently proves a point about something. Perhaps it shows that Thorpe should “go see what it’s really like”.

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Funding appeals for better community infrastructure to divert troubled kids in Alice Springs are going unheeded. Instead, NT bureaucrats suggest restricting alcohol is the best solution to growing youth crime.

(Implicit in their willingness to answer Yemini’s questions, for that matter, is that they don’t know him any more than they know Thorpe. Perhaps this unfamiliarity only speaks to working-class NT folks’ disinterest in Victorian politics.)

Nobody in the Australian media class is very good at articulating a solid understanding of figures like Yemini. I’d rather read about him from people who’ve had to grapple with him for years in the activist political space he began his grift around — people like my friend, slackbastard.

‘The attention economy + narcissism + consumer demand for validation of inequality and violence = Avi Yemini,’ he correctly calculated. Yemini is ‘enacting a business model that caters to online demand for what, in law and sociology, is often termed “hate speech”’.

For all the work I’ve done exposing Yemini’s tired bullshit, this is probably just about all you need to read on the guy nowadays. The political and establishment media class invents the racist tune; figures like Yemini just loiter around afterwards running tribute nights performing it for money.

I wouldn’t have mentioned him at all, really, but real people get co-opted into these videos — and those people are often unwitting, if not unwilling. I spoke to a relative of someone who was utilised in Avi’s second Alice video.

They said:

“Questions were fired off [at them] at rapid sporadic bursts without really giving consideration to the cultural aspects of the person, how well they could speak on the issue and, if at all, how aware of the subjects they were of while being asked. Most of the relatives that do live in Mparntwe do not care about politics and carry on with their lives oblivious to the goings on around them.”

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Since attaining the dubious honour of Liberal Party Leader, Peter Dutton has really taken that mantle to new depths.

The perspectives of the people unfairly co-opted into these racist moral panic campaigns must never be ignored. So, too, must the supply of bullshit and rumour masquerading as fact during these moral panic campaigns must always be exposed.

When that “outback nurse” appeared, a handful of people, including myself, questioned her credibility in speaking to the welfare of Indigenous children in Alice Springs. I was attacked for that by News Corp and Daily Mail journalists. But I note that that same “outback nurse” yesterday pled guilty to charges stemming from assuming the identity of a business rival to write a fake statutory declaration that would force that rival to isolate for COVID instead of running their business.

Perhaps we were right to voice concerns over the credibility of Ben Fordham’s “expert” after all.

Meanwhile, solid organisation among NT Indigenous communities is happening. Strategies are being formed. “The outcomes of the meetings that the Aboriginal groups discussed about the ongoing situation in Mparntwe are being implemented by their respective groups,” the concerned relative of the man roped into Avi’s video told me. “There is full confidence of the groups involved and within the community in general, that it will go as planned. It will take time and hard effort working together with the wider community.”

But it appears that the political class, the media and “independent” vultures don’t really care about any of that hard work. They’re putting their cosplay Akubras and country attire back in the closet for now. They only ever needed Alice for political football.

Tom Tanuki is a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist. Tom does weekly videos on YouTube commenting on the Australian political fringe. You can follow Tom on Twitter @tom_tanuki.