Government Solutions Do Not Address the Fundamental Needs of the People
Is this the most hellish town on earth? Above, a cloudless cobalt sky. Beneath, red dirt. To the north, to the south, to the east, and to the west, undulating, scrubby, featureless, and iron-rich land. Summer temperatures can reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 C). During a late nineteenth-century gold rush, it was the biggest settlement between Perth, 1,600 kilometers south, and Darwin, 2,600 kilometers northwest. Nowadays Roebourne, Western Australia, is the child abuse capital of the nation.
According to a searing report in The Australian newspaper, Roebourne is "a festering mess of intergenerational child sexual abuse where kids are more likely to be raped than almost anywhere else on earth."1
More than half of the 1,400 or so people in Roebourne and its surrounding communities are Aboriginal. About 80 percent of the inhabitants are on welfare. Recently retired West Australian Police Commissioner Karl O'Callaghan said that the rate of alleged child sex offending in Roebourne is "staggering" and that the community is in an "almost unrecoverable crisis."
The problem is so widespread that locals believe that child sex abuse is just "normal." Not long ago, police charged 36 local men with more than 300 offences, past and present, against 184 children—in a town whose school has only 200 enrolled students. But the government knows that the cancer of abuse has sunk so deeply into the community that removing the pedophiles will not bring an end to the problem.
The grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and even great-great-grandmothers have been left with the job of keeping many of the children out of harm's way.2 Many kids are too frightened to stay with their alcoholic or drug-addled parents. "They walk around and look for safety, somewhere safe to go, especially at night," says one of the community's elders. "You can't go to a place that is crowded with alcohol. Parents are not doing what they're supposed to be -doing."
Facilitating Dysfunction
How can such a dysfunctional community recover? There has been no lack of government support. In 2014, a total of 63 governmental and non-governmental providers delivered more than 200 services, at a cost of $58,719.00 (Australian) per year for each resident. Yet despite all that effort by well-intentioned bureaucrats, Roebourne is still being described as "the town of the damned."
Insofar as there is a strategy for recovery, it seems to be this: Give 11-year-old girls contraceptive implants, arrest the sex-abusers, restrict sales of alcohol, and make welfare payments largely cashless. The despairing police commissioner has even suggested that some of the Aboriginal communities should be closed, forcing residents to move to the larger town, where they can get more help.
"If we facilitate the existence of communities beset by substance abuse, family violence and child abuse hundreds of kilometers from support or intervention services, then we must accept the loss of yet another generation of Aboriginal children," O'Callaghan wrote a couple of years ago.3
Year after year, decade after decade, Australian governments, state and federal, have poured billions of dollars into communities like Roebourne. And many of them are still hellish. No place on earth confirms the wisdom of Ronald Reagan's quip better than this isolated town: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'"
Two Great Flaws
There seem to be two fundamental flaws in the current policy.
First, there is the assumption that steady, demanding, honest work is not fundamental to human dignity and that welfare is an adequate substitute for a job.
But this is almost criminally wrong. "Sit-down money"—as it is called in Australia—robs adults, men especially, of their sense of self-worth. "Unless our passive welfare dependency is soon addressed, it will inevitably cause the disintegration of our communities and the annihilation of our culture," warns Noel Pearson, a prominent Aboriginal leader in the Cape York Peninsula, on the other side of the continent.
Second, there is the assumption that the family unit doesn't need to be protected. This assumption is, for lack of better words, simply wicked. Article 16 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights states that "the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State." But Australian society (like most of the West) is skeptical of this great truth. Divorce and co-habitation are common and unremarkable.
Noel Pearson suggests that these two errors are intertwined. Passive welfare has destroyed both the will to work and family cohesion:
We have allowed Aboriginal policy to forget that our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents struggled mightily to preserve our families and communities—our society, our laws and values—against great and constant attack, and we survived. Whatever our material deprivations, whatever our poverty, we had a strong if bruised society. . . . [But] we are socially poorer today despite vastly improved material circumstances.4
White Australia can survive a certain amount of family dysfunction. The children of its fractured families suffer, but they still go to school, eat regular meals, and have shoes on their feet.
But what makes white Australia sneeze is deadly for indigenous Australia—just as in the nineteenth century, when white colonists were able to shrug off smallpox infections while countless thousands of Aboriginals were killed by the disease. Unless governments do whatever it takes to encourage indigenous communities to rebuild their families, they will continue to sink ever further into Roebourne's quicksand of substance abuse and sex abuse.
Michael Cook Get Salvo in your inbox! This article originally appeared in Salvo, Issue #43, Winter 2017 Copyright © 2026 Salvo | www.salvomag.com https://salvomag.com/article/salvo43/family-downed-under
