https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-09/bail-law-amendments-resulting-in-more-fir...


Samara Laverty has made it her life's work to campaign for tougher bail laws and knife crime prevention.

That's because her son Declan was killed by a man who was on bail for a previous violent stabbing.

"If you do commit a serious violence offence, I don't care who you are, you don't get the chance to go and do that again," she said.

Clashed between hundreds of people have broken out in the remote aboriginal community of Wadeye, days after notorious outback gang the Jovi Boys raided a store in a nearby township.

Northern Territory Police said officers conducting proactive patrols saw an altercation involving about 50 people with “blunt weapons” on Perdjert Street at about 7.50pm on Friday, and forced the combatants to disperse.

But at 9pm a new brawl with up to 300 combatants with blunt and edged weapons erupted on the same street, and when police arrived the crowd became hostile and officers withdrew “for safety reasons”, police said.


The theft, which came after a long-awaited restocking following flooding that cut off the town, sparked a stand-off between the gang and furious local families, NT News reported.

One local said the Jovi Boys had allegedly attacked the homes of families who had objected to their behaviour, and had been more hostile in recent weeks.

“We have a beautiful community… but these fellas are a problem. They have no respect,” the community member said.

Police from Wadeye, 90 minutes away, attended along with members of the Territory Response Group to conduct patrols and restore order the next day.


Last weekend Wadeye was rocked by 24 hours of violence, which involved large groups fighting with makeshift weapons including window louvres, and a video showed a Land Cruiser being driven at a crowd.

A week before that police made 20 arrests after hundreds of aboriginals fought in the street with weapons including crossbows and cars were set alight, and a huge pile of weapons was seized after police spotted six males with “improvised weapons” walking near the Wadeye Health Clinic amid a suspected family feud.

The seizure followed another clash where a man was shot with a crossbow during a fight between 15 people that was linked to unrest involving about 100 people, some armed with edged weapons, that broke out a couple of days earlier.

Violence also erupted in Wadeye in early December on the eve of a No More march against domestic, family and sexual violence.


Hundreds of aboriginals then fought running battles in Maningrida in Arnhem Land between January 1 and January 4, and in nearby Ramingining up to 40 people fought with blunt and edged weapons, including spears, just before Christmas.

A clash between 30 people broke out in Yuendumu near Alice Springs on January 8, in late January a man was wounded by an “edged weapon” during a 50-person brawl in Minyerri, and a day after that a group of about 100 people began fighting and throwing rocks at police in Santa Theresa.



https://x.com/actionforalice/status/2017786947218059432


Elders, past present and future, welcome to cuntry.

Sir Grappler Truth Teller OAM wrote on Feb 9^th, 2026 at 11:24am:




rising ocean levels ?   

Dear Grapps,

we need to return to 19th century British justice -

that is the only way to save our society.

Bobby. wrote on Feb 9^th, 2026 at 11:43am:

Wadeye into the present: The Aboriginal Land Rights Act was a Whitlam-era ideological experiment premised on the fantasy that land transfer and autonomy would allow Aboriginal people to revert to a viable “traditional” existence inside a modern nation-state. Wadeye is the living wreckage of that idea. Fifty years on, it has no real economy, no self-sufficiency, no civic order, and no credible path forward. Land has been handed over, and the result is not empowerment but stagnation, violence, and permanent dependency. Wadeye is not transitional. It is the end state of a policy that mistook symbolic restitution for governance. No government has been willing to confront or unwind the model, because any attempt at reform is immediately racialised and treated as illegitimate.

For most residents of Wadeye, the land on which the settlement now stands is not their traditional country, but the product of post-contact aggregation of multiple, unrelated groups. The move to Wadeye did not preserve clan estates, territorial boundaries, or land-based authority; it replaced them with mission and administrative governance. As a result, whatever cultural identity residents may hold today is largely detached from the land itself. Claims of cultural attachment at Wadeye therefore function as symbolic or expressive assertions, not as evidence of continuing territorial possession, traditional landholding, or enduring law and custom tied to that place.

Today, entry to Wadeye is controlled. Access is conditional. Non-residents may be excluded by permit.

The tragedy is not misunderstanding or neglect. The tragedy is that, in this form, it repeatedly manifests as violence. In Wadeye, violence is not a breakdown of cultural order but one of its operating mechanisms. Disputes are not resolved but recycled; authority fragments along clan lines; and conflict reproduces itself across generations within a closed system insulated from correction. Violence emerges not despite the system, but from within it.

Culture is not morally neutral. Any cultural system that cannot suppress violence, cannot protect children, and cannot impose binding restraint forfeits any claim to preservation in its existing form. Change is not an external imposition by the state or by outsiders. It is a requirement imposed by reality.

That fact renders the events at Wadeye far more serious, not less. When mass violence erupts on private land, the question is no longer simply why police struggled to intervene, but why the land-controlling authority has made no provision for internal security at all. The Northern Land Council is not a marginal or impoverished body. It is one of the wealthiest statutory land councils in Australia, controlling vast territories, negotiating resource agreements worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and maintaining substantial financial reserves. It asserts authority over land use, access, and exclusion, yet disclaims any operational responsibility for safety, order, or civil peace on the land it controls. This is self-determination in its most complete and unfiltered form: land is owned, access is controlled, authority is asserted, and external interference is resisted,— yet the core obligations of governance are absent. Security is not provided. Order is not maintained. What is presented as autonomy is, in practice, authority without duty. The failure is not accidental or transitional. It is structural. Wadeye does not represent a breakdown of self-determination. It represents its most faithful realisation.


The same permit-based land regime that excludes external authority also repels essential services. Doctors cannot be retained. Teachers will not stay. Tradespeople will not enter. Emergency staff are reluctant to deploy. Education collapses into rotation. Health care becomes episodic. Infrastructure decays. This is not remoteness. This is a dangerous place and rational people will not go.
Over half a century, outcomes have not stabilised or improved. They have deteriorated. Violence has been normalised. Authority has fragmented. Internal enforcement has vanished. Police oscillate between emergency intervention and withdrawal. When hundreds mobilise with weapons, no internal authority — elders, councils, committees, or cultural bodies — can intervene.


Land councils assert ownership and exclusion but exercise no responsibility for order. Elders are invoked ceremonially but possess no coercive authority. The state withdraws in theory and is forced back in practice only when violence reaches levels that are otherwise unthinkable.

This condition is often softened with the language of disadvantage. That term is grossly inadequate and misdirects the truth. What exists instead is segregation by design, enforced separation from the ordinary civic systems of Australia, maintained through land control, access restriction, and political insulation. Unlike historical apartheid, this system is not imposed by an external racial state. It is chosen, defended, and enforced internally, while its human and financial costs are externalised to police, hospitals, and taxpayers who are simultaneously criticised for intervening and blamed for failing to do so.
https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/aborigines/welcome-to-wadeye/

The federal Aboriginal affairs portfolio exists to advance the safety, welfare, and dignity of Aboriginal people. It intervenes frequently in matters of symbolism, representation, and historical grievance. Yet in the face of organised mass violence involving hundreds of people, on private Aboriginal land, in a community long identified as high-risk, the ministerial response has been silence. No emergency governance reform has been proposed. No demand has been made that land-controlling authorities provide security. No accountability has been imposed on those who exercise control without consequence. This is not oversight. It is abdication.

The financial dimension makes the failure even starker. While precise figures vary by methodology, per-capita public expenditure in remote communities such as Wadeye is widely estimated to fall in the range of $20,000 to $40,000 per person per year, excluding capital write-offs and episodic emergency interventions. In major urban centres, the comparable figure is closer to $12,000 per person and is substantially offset by income tax, payroll tax, consumption taxes, and economic participation. In Wadeye there is no such offset. This is a permanently mendicant system: public expenditure at two to three times the national rate, with no revenue base, no convergence trajectory, and no plausible path to self-support. If this is the practical meaning of native title and self-determination as currently constructed, then the policy has not merely failed—it has institutionalised permanent dependency at extraordinary cost.

The silence of the Australian Human Rights Commission is more damning still. The Commission has positioned itself as an ever-present arbiter of rights, quick to condemn state action, policing, incarceration, speech, and symbolism. It has not hesitated to intervene where harm is alleged to flow from government authority. Yet where Aboriginal people are subjected to sustained violence, where essential services withdraw because safety cannot be guaranteed, and where children, women, and the vulnerable are exposed to ongoing risk, the Commission has declined to act. No inquiry has been commenced. No urgent statement issued. No visit announced. The implication is unavoidable: human-rights scrutiny is triggered only when the state intervenes, not when Aboriginal governance fails.

Taken together, these facts expose a closed loop of institutional self-protection. Land councils assert control without enforcement. Ministers defer in the name of autonomy. Human-rights bodies intervene only when the state acts, never when it withdraws. Each institution points elsewhere. No one is responsible. In any other Australian context, sustained mass violence, exclusion of essential services, and failure to provide basic security would trigger immediate ministerial action, regulatory intervention, and human-rights inquiry. That these mechanisms do not activate here demonstrates a governing framework that has inverted accountability: the more power is claimed in the name of culture and representation, the less responsibility is borne for outcomes. The result is not self-determination. It is immunity from scrutiny. This is the ultimate failure of the self-determination paradigm as presently constructed. It has created zones of authority without duty, representation without liability, and rights discourse without protection. Silence, in this context, is not neutrality. It is complicity.



The events at Wadeye are therefore not an aberration. They are a signal. When authority is asserted without responsibility, when land is controlled but order is disclaimed, and when the state withdraws in deference to an ideology of autonomy, the result is not cultural flourishing but predictable institutional collapse. Violence is merely the most visible symptom. The deeper failures appear where governance matters most: the protection of children, the safety of women, and the enforcement of law. It is here—away from symbolism and rhetoric—that the cost of this model must be measured.

ibid.