A small town in the north of Western Australia by the name of South Hedland has been the focus of national attention for some nine weeks. However, this is not cause for celebration. Quite the opposite.

It is representative of how a state has lost its way, sadly costing the lives of the most vulnerable.

South Hedland is part of the town of Port Hedland, located in the Pilbara region of the state, the place where iron ore is loaded onto ships for export and provides a large part of the record revenue that has flowed into state government coffers. It should be one of the wealthiest places in the country.

Despite the biggest fiscal boom (thanks to mining revenue) since the gold rush of the 1890s, as has been revealed over the last few weeks, this mining town is rife with shocking evidence of widespread sexual abuse, neglect and violence perpetrated against Aboriginal children that has been ignored by the South Hedland District Office of the WA Department of Child Protection.

In 2022, three children were murdered in South Hedland. They are known as the Hawke children.

The three children, Jamelia, ten years of age, Arnda, aged seven, and Kelvin, just four months old, were stabbed and strangled to death by their meth-addicted mother. Devastatingly, this tragedy was avoidable. Their grandmother, Dorothy Papertalk, had repeatedly asked for these three children to be removed from their mother’s care, where they were living in a house of squalor compounded by extraordinary domestic violence.

Despite her pleas, the Department of Communities in Western Australia returned the children to their mother.

The Department of Child Protection also ignored repeated warnings from police and the Department of Housing that the children were at imminent risk of harm.

Yet Labor Premier Roger Cook will not admit there is something rotten in the state of Western Australia.

South Hedland is also the home of the Frisby Court children, 15 in number, as young as five, who, as reported by Ros Thomas in the Australian, ‘were discovered running like wild dogs and living in filth without adults for days at a time’.

The hapless and seriously inexperienced Child Protection Minister, Jessica Stojkovski, incurred the wrath of Port Hedland’s three most senior female Aboriginal elders when she said in parliament the Frisby Court house was not her definition of ‘squalid’. Stojkovski then claimed ‘there was no evidence of any neglected kids’ despite the above-described eyewitness accounts.

How is it that children can be allowed to be in homes with no adults present and the Department of Child Protection failed to respond to reports of child rapes and beatings?

Yet, Roger Cook continues to defend his minister. After weeks of refusing to visit Port Hedland, Cook made a flying visit on 24 October and was angrily confronted by the locals. For weeks, he and his Attorney-General, Tony Buti, steadfastly refused to hold an inquest into the deaths of the Hawke Children, even after the WA Coroner denied Dorothy Papertalk’s request to do so.

As Thomas reported, Buti claimed legal advice presented to him by the state’s solicitor’s office said he did not have the statutory power to direct an inquest when one had already been refused.

This is despite calls from the former governor of Western Australia and one of the state’s most distinguished members of the legal profession, Malcolm McCusker KC, along with the former WA solicitor-general, Grant Donaldson SC and the former District Court judge and long serving president of the WA Children’s Court, Denis Reynolds, who wrote to Buti castigating him for failing to direct that an inquest be held into the deaths of the Hawke children. They declared that there was ‘no legal impediment’ to the WA Attorney-General ordering an inquest even when a WA Coroner had already refused to do so.

After weeks of pressure, Buti relented on October 15, agreeing to direct the Coroner to hold an inquest into these tragic deaths.

It is emblematic of a government whose priorities are askew. And, as always, ultimate responsibility rests with the Premier.

Cook’s government pushes ahead with a racetrack that nobody wants, entertains removing the Lord’s Prayer from parliamentary proceedings, yet cannot do the fundamental things right.

Roger Cook’s record of incompetence has been years in the making.

As Health Minister in the McGowan government, Cook abolished the Department of Child Protection as a standalone department in 2017. This had led to serious under-resourcing. The Child Protection office in South Hedland is not staffed with any full-time personnel. There is a roster of four part-time employees from Perth.

Now three children are dead, despite repeated warnings.

Record ambulance ramping and hospital overcrowding are the order of the day. The latter is one of the factors that led to the tragic death of Aishwarya Aswath at the Perth Children’s Hospital, with the state coroner’s report finding that the hospital staffing roster had been inadequate to deal with demand. Guess who was the health minister at the time? Roger Cook.

Now he has failed upwards as Premier, but still cannot bring himself to admit failure, even when the evidence is overwhelming. Addressing the Department’s failures in South Hedland, he reverts to cultural relativist statements, such as, ‘Look, I think it’s a very difficult area to work in. We are dealing with multi-generational disadvantages and poverty and dislocation, and that’s why we work with the Commonwealth government around the Closing the Gap targets to make sure that we do our bit. It’s very hard work, but it’s work that we’re up for.’

As an ardent supporter of the ‘Yes’ vote in the Voice referendum, Cook would no doubt have lined up with the social justice warriors who vilified the late cartoonist Bill Leak, whose 2016 cartoon in the Australian exposed the truth about the appalling levels of violence endured by Aboriginal women and children. How prophetic that cartoon was.

Premier Cook obviously is not ‘up for it’. Until we purge cultural relativism from the national psyche and give real meaning to equality of citizenship, tragedies such as those in South Hedland will continue to occur.

It is said that US President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk that reminded him, constantly ‘The buck stops here’. If only Roger Cook would do the same.