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CANBERRA - Australia's national trauma over the sexual abuse of Aboriginal children has crossed the border from the Northern Territory into Western Australia.
As health checks ordered under Prime Minister John Howard's dramatic intervention in the NT began yesterday, police in WA charged six men with 18 offences relating to girls aged between 11 and 14.
They follow the pregnancy of a 13-year-old girl and the earlier arrests of 15 other men in another northwestern Aboriginal community.
And as federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough offered to send the Army to help a continuing police crackdown on indigenous child-sex abuse in WA, police in the NT had to flee one town with an accused rapist to save him from a lynch mob.
While a new poll has shown overwhelming popular support for Howard's NT intervention, the package of measures faces a legal challenge that might go as far as the High Court.
Yesterday the Newspoll in the Australian reported that while support for intervention has pushed Howard's personal stocks higher, the moves have failed to help the Government's prospects in this year's elections. The poll, which reported that 61 per cent of respondents welcomed federal action in the NT, showed a rise in Labor's primary vote and an election-winning 56 per cent of the two-party preferred vote that decides elections under Australia's preferential voting system.
The WA arrests were part of a long-running police operation launched after child protection workers in February reported the pregnancy of a 13-year-old Halls Creek girl and her contraction of a sexually transmitted disease. The girl has since given birth.
Perth Magistrate Sue Gordon, a member of the task force overseeing Howard's intervention in the NT, was also involved in a damning report on child sex abuse and drug-taking in Halls Creek and surrounding areas of the Kimberley region in far north WA. The taskforce investigating sex abuse there is now considering likely charges against another 20 men, following allegations by seven girls.
State Premier Alan Carpenter refused to join the intervention in the NT, telling Howard he did not have the officers to spare to help police efforts there. He said a long-term, community-based effort was needed to win the trust of remote communities, rather than a strike force operating for only days or weeks.
The Northern Territory News reported that an Aborginal man had to be saved from death by police after allegedly abducting and sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl in a remote community. The man had been beaten and fled to the local police station, chased by 200 irate residents. An unmarked car raced the man out of town and on to Darwin as other police intercepted a vehicle full of pursuers.
"Everyone has been saying [the police] should have let the mob get him," a witness told the News. "The mob was out to get him and they would have killed him if they could."
Controversy over Howard's measures continued to grow. In Darwin, community organisations said that Howard was implementing only three of the 97 recommendations of the report that had prompted intervention. And the Northern Land Council, supported by the NT Government, intends launching a legal challenge to Howard's plan to take control of indigenous land and communities.
