Nt Drunks Get Drinking Ban
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday May 3, 1994
Northern Territory Aborigines who have spent time in sobering-up shelters are facing total bans on drinking in hotels and jail sentences if they do drink. Aboriginal groups say the move is recriminalising drunkenness by stealth.
The North Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service said at least 12 Darwin Aborigines received letters last month from the Liquor Commission informing them that they faced prohibition orders - a drinking ban - because they had been taken into protective custody for drunkenness at least three times in the past six months.
Under the Liquor Act, a breach of a prohibition order can result in a$1,000 fine or six months' jail if the drinker is served alcohol or is on licensed premises.
A legal service lawyer, Mr Bill Somerville, said the move was against the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody's recommendations that Aborigines should not be jailed for being drunk.
Mr Somerville said protective custody orders, introduced after the decriminalisation of public drunkenness in 1974, were designed to keep drunks out of jail and allow them to sober up before being released or treated for alcoholism.
"They're picked up drunk and the decriminalisation system is that they're taken to the sobering-up shelter or the watch-house ... this is criminalising it by stealth, by the back door," he said.
The registrar of the Liquor Commission, Mr Terry Hanley, said that last month he sent 20 letters advising people that they faced prohibition orders. He said seven people already had orders in Darwin but these had been issued by a magistrate at hearings for other offences.
The commission was now "being more vigilant" and it was the first time applications were being made for people picked up for being drunk, Mr Hanley said.
The commission had deliberately pursued both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cases and letters were sent to people who had been picked up at least 10 times for drunkenness, he said.
Asked whether drunks would be imprisoned, Mr Hanley said: "That's a hard question. They won't be in jail for drinking, (they'll be) in jail for breaking a prohibition order."
© 1994 Sydney Morning Herald
