Catherine Liddle

But for town camps, there is nothing there is not already known.

We know that people in town camps live well below the poverty line.

We know that overcrowding in Indigenous communities has been a massive problem for a very long time.

What's new is the number of offenders being released from jail and turning up on town camps.

What is new is the sheer size and churn of people going into our justice system because tough on crime to be effective doesn't mean we're going to punish you immediately.

After something horrific has happened, tough on crime means, you know what, we're going to divert our attention now into investing in the structures and services that we need that genuinely keep you and your family safe.

And they are system structures.

I would hope so.

I really, really would hope so.

And I think we've seen two things recently that are slightly different.

Now, I want to be really clear, the mainstream media didn't pick up this story until Community came out, right?

So Baby Girl was missing for nearly 48 hours before it was picked up by mainstream media.

And it was picked up because of the sheer number of people

in the local community that heard about it and came out en masse and said, we're going to donate, we're going to volunteer, we're going to talk about it, we're going to look for baby girl, we need to bring her back to the arms of her mother.

There were hundreds of people that gave up their time to walk through grass up to your, on me, I'm pointing to my eyes if you can't see me, in quite hot conditions, you know, and we've had

big rain, which means there's snakes everywhere.

And people were out there, they put on their jeans and they put on their boots and they said, what matters is finding Kumjai little baby.

And you can do that in a microcosm.

You know, Alice Springs is a microcosm.

We're only 22,000 people.