Comment on Street kids refuge: Now you see it, now you don’t. by Steve Brown.
To put comments contained in the article into context: This is what we were discussing, a very important first step in achieving the outcome spoken about in the first motion.
It is important to understand that the motion is Elected Members instruction to Council Officers:
Motion from Committees Item 11.1:
In Keeping with the intentions of Councils Port Augusta Report and in reacting to expressed community concerns that no child should left unsupervised on our streets at night and that doing so clearly places the child and community in harm’s way and as such must be seen as a failing of the community’s duty of care to both the child and community.
The intention of the motion is to address the issue of young children being on our streets at night: Presently council and its partners, Congress and the NT Government, offer a joint pickup service for these children.
This service often sees young children who should be attending school the next day being taken home or to a safe location very late at night.
The objective: To get these children off the streets at a much earlier time by providing a fun, safe, non-judgemental place of activities and community interaction all professionally supervised with food and beds provided for those in need. Those who have a home to go to would be transported home at a reasonable hour.
Attendance at this centre or centres is to be completely voluntary! But just as in the case of Blue Light Discos once you’re in your in for the night, unless you are being picked up by a parent or guardian or being transported directly home by the pick up service.
A. I propose that we withdraw the following recommendation from the CCS committee meeting:
The Council engage with the existing partners and invite new partners to be part of the process of developing a night safe house that caters for children who are involved in the Youth Night Patrol.
B. That we put up a new motion to the effect of:
That Council engage with the Department of the Chief Minister and Congress, who are existing partners in the Youth Night Patrol, along with other interested parties who are either already providing or who are interested in offering further after hours youth services. Prepare a report inclusive of the following for Council’s further consideration:
1. The numbers of children who are likely to need or interact with a service if provided.
2. What services are available now.
3. Catalogue other parties interested in providing service or activities,
We added point four
4. That Council accepts the responsibility of being the facilitator in this process … or words to that effect.
On the surface this may appear as backing away from the original intention. It is not!
We cannot responsibly proceed further with that objective without first gathering the information requested in the report. This is the beginning of a process!
As the person who first raised in my view the glaring necessity to do something about the children on our streets as part of the Port Augusta Report, now some four years ago, and as the person who raised it once again on this occasion, I am mighty pleased that fellow Council members have finally agreed to take this first step.
Clearly, whether or not the process is followed all the way to an outcome will also depend on the strength of fellow councillors’ convictions.
It’s up to you, the public, to pressure them into doing so. For the moment we await the report with great anticipation.
Steve Brown Also Commented
Street kids refuge: Now you see it, now you don’t.
Please let’s not get distracted. Council is not talking about criminalised children! That is a separate issue!
We are talking about unsupervised children who hang about on our streets for all kinds of reasons.
Children who are very obviously in danger of being criminalised, by virtue of the fact that they are on the streets.
This makes Council discussions every bit as essential as is taking action on the issues relating to children in custody. We are trying to prevent “these kids” from becoming “those kids” and if we succeed, everybody wins.
Recent Comments by Steve Brown
Gallery fiasco: school heritage process ‘massively flawed’
Oddly enough Domeninco, from around 1984 I’ve noted an escalating deterioration of our town’s earlier strengths and character.
Those of us who are amongst the town’s earliest families, the builders of the Alice and other towns in the Territory, understood what it took to create healthy, well balanced, economically viable, communities.
Unfortunately the vibrancy once driven by a very healthy private sector has long since given way to petty bureaucracy and welfareism along with all the blow in petty politic of envy and ignorance those sectors brought with them.
Replacing vibrancy, hope and belief with a petty mentality of obstructionism and envy, glaring down, standing in the way of, anything that might create, dare I say, the dirty words economic progress!
This attempt to save an ugly, rotten old, asbestos riddled building of no architectural merit is just another example of that moronic stifling mentality.
Crime and corruption about which these people winge constantly, flourishes in places that don’t offer hope and progress!
Sloth and disillusionment flourish in places of bureaucratic overload and petty envious obstructionism!
To clean our town up, to get it moving, to offer hope, we need to deal with those things!
We simply must learn to walk right on bye the wingers, specially the blow-in wingers, and to get right on with building our town, a place of enormous potential if only it is given enough air to breathe.
Gallery fiasco: school heritage process ‘massively flawed’
There is absolutely nothing architecturally noteworthy about this crappy old building, just because a particular person visited, walked past, looked at or went to this school doesn’t make it a place that must be preserved!
It would hang like a millstone around the community’s collective necks for perpetuity.
This building has been sitting there rotting for years yet you suddenly find a deep underlying passion and love for it when another use for its location is found?
I cry BS on this claim!
You are simply being obstructionist! As per usual I might add!
Keeping old completely un-noteworthy buildings in premier positions simply creates an enormously expensive ulcerating rot in the central locations of town, forcing us to extend our CBD over a wider and wider area destroying along with that expansion any chance of creating a thriving central CBD.
So while there certainly are buildings that are noteworthy and worth preserving despite this fact ie Flynn Church and Adelaide House etc.
Much less noteworthy building such as this old school must give way to the new!
Private forecaster tips massive rains for Alice
Heavy rains will certainly be welcome, no doubt about it Ed, but 30 to 50mm is a long way short of what’s required to produce floods like the one pictured.
That kind of flood requires closer to 200mm over a fairly short period of time … wouldn’t that be nice?
Big crowd at local School Strike 4 Climate Action
@ Evelyn: While I agree with the general intent of your comment it is important to note for the interested children’s education, that neither their action nor any taken by this nation will have the slightest effect on the world climate! Even if we could completely halt all of our carbon production tomorrow, it would not make the slightest difference to climate change.
So by all means kids work towards a cleaner environment, cleaner air and cleaner oceans, but don’t be taken for a ride by those who seek to create irrational fears about your own beautiful world, through politically motivated, fear mongering garbage, about climate change.
It is a natural part of our world and always will be!
The thing we really do need to need fear and guard against, are the mindless efforts of indoctrinated climate fanatics who seek through their ignorance and city bred real world isolation, to do something irrational about planetary warming.
It would benefit everyone to keep in mind that a warming climate is a more productive climate, while on the other hand a cooling climate very quickly becomes a threat to all life on earth, through starvation!
Let’s hope we get to sit somewhere in between. In the meantime there is one very real threat we should all fight and guard against, the life threatening efforts of climate science to artificially interfere with our climate. One stupid mistake and “Winter really will be coming”!
‘Arrogant’ government fails to answer 20 questions
Didn’t Robyn spruik long and loud the benefits of having an Independent Member for Araluen?
Now she is completely bound up in petty squabbling about more resources.
And not one single question to Government about things that affect the rest of us.
While the Territory goes to hell in a hand basket!
No pressure on Government at all!
Talk about ineffective.
You are payed a dam good wage plus expenses. Write your own speeches and for the Territory’s sake, get on with the job.
[ED – Mr Brown was the CLP candidate for Araluen.]
