Buying petrol? Then don’t fuel around

The CAYLUS submission (pdf file 71KB) to the recent coronial inquiry into petrol sniffing deaths at Multijulu does not mince words: “Young people in Central Australia sniff petrol because it is the best thing on offer. They sniff because their friends do, because their family is drinking or dead, because petrol is readily available, and because they are hungry. They sniff to get away from pain.”

It’s passé and PC to mention it, but this sort of thing hasn’t been happening out in the bush for all that long. Certainly not before we white fellas blundered into town with alcohol, gunpowder, venereal disease and all the other goodies which have served black Australia so well over the last couple of hundred years.

Call me a chardonnay-swilling socialist if it makes you feel good - I actually prefer a shiraz - but this won’t make the facts of the previous paragraph any less true.

An earlier coronial inquest in 2002 took evidence from Kawaki Thompson, who had lost his son to the scourge of sniffing.

Mr Thompson asked: “Who is responsible? The petrol doesn’t belong to us. It is not part of Anangu law. It was introduced to the lands by white people. The problem with petrol comes from the outside - like the Maralinga bomb tests. The solution should come from outside too.” Game, set and match.

CAYLUS has called on the Federal Government to subsidise the comprehensive roll out of Opal fuel in the Central Australian Cross-border Region. The submission identifies an area bounded roughly by Coober Pedy, Mt Isa, Tennant Creek and Laverton as containing the largest cluster of petrol sniffers in the country.

Until sniffable fuel is removed from this whole region, the government is only wallpapering a termite-infested house. The treasurer needs simply to put his hand in our (collective) pocket and spend the few extra dollars necessary to complete the task and save some lives.

My stylish 1991 four-cylinder rust-bucket goes through more oil than petrol these days. But when it’s time to top up the tank, I zoom into the servo which is all decked out in the green and gold.

A patriotic purchase? Not really. I’m told that the mob involved are Pommies. That’s right. Ashes owners. (Whether it was bad planning, batting problems or bloody Pieterson is beside the point. The urn has turned.)

But I digress. The landscape of Indigenous Australia is littered with Broken Promises and Blathering Prattle. There is a screaming need for Bipartisan Policy to realise this Bold Plan. So which oil company came up with this Brilliant Product?

Journalistic integrity (snicker!) prevents me from unbagging this cat. But I think it’s safe to say that the importance of eradicating petrol-sniffing from the Central Desert region is truly Beyond Petroleum.

So Buy Purposefully!