Content warning: this article contains detailed descriptions of domestic violence.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers please note that this article mentions deceased persons.
An Alice Springs pokies executive told the coroner his club had “no requirement” to check if patrons buying booze in-house were on the banned alcohol registry, but his staff retained a right to remove banned drinkers if police turned up and identified them.
Gillen Club board member Kyle Pearson said it would be “problematic” and “quite time-consuming” to swipe the IDs of customers purchasing alcohol in-house the same way they are legally required to do for anyone buying takeaway liquor.
Northern Territory Coroner Elisabeth Armitage suggested all licensed premises be fitted with a reception that could give patrons colour-coded armbands according to alcohol eligibility: “For example, a yellow band if they’re able to purchase alcohol and a red band if they’re not able to purchase alcohol.”
“I would imagine that could be problematic with such a large venue,” Pearson said.
Peason appeared before the Alice Springs Local Court via video link on Thursday to give evidence about the Gillen Club’s policies, procedures and conduct on January 7 2021 when Kumarn Rubuntja and her partner, Malcolm Abbott, were evicted from the club hours before he killed her.
Rubuntja’s death is the focus of the fourth in a series of coronial inquests into domestic and family violence in the Northern Territory.
On the day of her death, Rubuntja and Abbott spent seven hours at the Gillen Club, during which it was reported they drank, played pokies and had a win before finally drawing the attention of security because Abbott became angry and aggressive.
“When he was yelling at the lady, did it look to you like he was trying to be hostile to her?” Phillip Boulten SC, the Rubuntja family’s lawyer, asked Gillen Club security guard Viliame Maivalenisau.
“Yes,” he replied.
“As the security guard, it was your job to keep everybody safe, wasn’t it?” Boulten said.
“Yes,” Maivalenisau responded, telling the inquest that Rubuntja had requested Abbott be removed because he was drunk and causing problems.
When asked to leave, Abbott threatened to get a gun and shoot Maivalenisau.
“I was jokingly telling him, ‘Remember if you bring your gun and you do it, if I don’t die, then it’s not good for you’,” Maivalenisau said, adding that he often uses this kind of language — “that I’m too big for you” — to help defuse volatile situations.
Abbott was shown the door and escorted outside, but refused to leave because he said Rubuntja had his car keys. At this point, then-Gillen Club supervisor Timothy Gray advised Maivalenisau to remove Rubuntja as well because Abbott was using her as an “excuse” to stick around.
“I noticed the evicted man was hanging around the entrance. So I suggested to the guard to have [Rubuntja] removed as she also appeared intoxicated and the man hanging around would only cause more problems to staff and other people inside the club,” Gray wrote in his statement.
He acknowledged in court that the club had a duty of care to ensure the safety of clientele leaving the premises, including intervention in obvious cases of drink driving.
“Malcolm Abbott was obviously over the limit when he was ejected from the club, wasn’t he?” Boulten asked Gray.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Even from the brief time that you could see him, you knew that man shouldn’t be driving, didn’t you?” Boulten continued.
“Yes,” Gray said, conceding to the court that he also had enough information to determine that Abbott was planning to get behind the wheel.
Maivalenisau told the inquest that it was not in his job description as a security guard to manage how members and patrons got home, to see whether they got in cars, or to keep order outside the club (in the carpark or on the footpath): “The only job that I can do in the carpark is sometimes go and check around the cars.”
“Were you concerned that he was going to drive his car when he was drunk?” Special Counsel assisting the Coroner Dr Peggy Dwyer asked Maivalenisau.
“I wasn’t contemplating that much,” he said.
A few hours after the couple left the club by car, Abbott killed Rubuntja by repeatedly driving at and over her in front of the Alice Springs Hospital. A toxicology report post-death found Rubuntja had a blood alcohol reading of 0.21%, and breath analysis of Abbott at the time of arrest registered 0.181%.
Abbott was meant to be listed on the NT’s banned drinking registry, but Territory Families (responsible for referrals) put forward the wrong name. The inquest heard that even if his name had been on the registry, Abbott was still in a position to purchase drinks from the Gillen Club because of loopholes that did not require ID checks for anything other than takeaway alcohol.
Pearson told the inquest that the Gillen Club had “pretty much straight away” conducted a review into its handling of the incident, although this had been done by the general manager and nothing had been written down. When asked how he knew a review had been conducted without written documentation, Pearson said the general manager told him in a text message.
The text was dated August 24 2023 (the same day Pearson gave evidence to the inquest) and was said to say: “We always call police now for any domestic violence related issues and try our best to distance those involved. Also the policies have been updated to include cultural awareness training.”
“I texted him today and asked him about it,” Pearson said, adding that it was “hard to say” whether his club handled the incident correctly. He reiterated that all procedures that played out “were the ones that were required to happen”.
“Was there anything for you to regret here or not?” Boulten asked Pearson.
“Personally, I regret that a lady has died,” he said.
“Yea, we all do. But what about the contribution of the club?” Boulten continued.
“I don’t know if I can answer that,” Pearson said.
Dwyer suggested to Pearson that it was not good practice to hand car keys to a man who was heavily intoxicated and to make the woman he was being aggressive towards leave with him.
“It’s obvious that he’s going to drink-drive if he’s given the keys … and there’s an obvious risk, given that Kumarn has been subject to threats, that she might be assaulted if she leaves with him,” Dwyer said.
“She was murdered and he did drink-drive.”
While the inquest heard about the devastating impact that alcohol and gambling continue to have on Indigenous communities — acting as an accelerant to domestic and family violence — Pearson told the court that Gillen Club promotes “ample advertisement to encourage responsible gambling” alongside its 55 gaming machines (as advertised on its website).
Despite the high number of Indigenous patrons, he didn’t know if any of this material was available in any language other than English.
If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000.
If you or someone you know is affected by alcohol or gambling addiction, call Gambler’s Help on 1800 858 858.
The real problems, as ever, are far more complex and fraught, and they are to do with individual and specific agency, the difficulty for external agencies (including hotels) in balancing ‘duty of care’ v. ‘dignity of risk’, and universal rights and dignity v. civic safety considerations, and the obvious reluctance of non-Indigenous Australians to properly contextualise tragic instances like this, out of an understandable fear of counter-productive contributions to ingrained issues of substance abuse, violence and dysfunction in parts of the Indigenous Australian population. What Bergin’s article and this thread discussion – like most discussions about specific events like this – doesn’t do is address openly what discussions of equivalent non-Indigenous events would (rightly) make their primary focus: firstly, that Malcolm Abbott is a recividist violent offender and lifelong alcohol abuser, with a string of convictions and jail terms for drunken violence (including fatal) against Indigenous women (often his partners). And second, that Kumarn Rubuntja was herself a well-known campaigner against Indigenous domestic violence, a founder of the Tangentyere Women’s Family Safety Group who had even addressed federal parliament on the issue, and so, unlike most victims of it, could surely, reasonably, be regarded as being a little better equipped and at least potentially more strongly supported in her agency, were she ever to find herself in such a toxic and dangerous relationship, as seems was the wider circumstantial case here. The #MeToo movement has rightly focused on male offenders’ agency and culpability as the start-point (and often the end-point, too) in any honest examination of what is truly ‘to blame’ for such violent acts. I’m acutely aware of the legitimacy of also addressing wider causal factors underlying individual acts of violence within the Indigenous community, like intergenerational trauma, post-colonial clan and familial dysfunction and the crippling impact of deeply-ingrained systemic and social racism and disadvantage. But I just don’t think it helps women like Rubuntja – Indigenous women who are entwined in toxic relationships with violent, substance-addicted men – for non-Indigenous Australian conversations on preventable tragedies like this to focus mostly on the relatively peripheral ‘complicity’ aspects (in this case of the hotel staff), while remaining relatively silent on those core aspects.
So many of our discussions about Indigenous community crime and all its unhappy consequences (which includes disproportionate incarceration rates) do exactly this: avoid squaring up to the specifics of Indigenous agency. That it’s mostly out of a desperate desire to avoid exacerbating destructive stereotypes and bulwarking bigoted world views is understandable, and even admirable. But I think that in doing so we are in effect adding to, not helping to address, the core problems. That, I think, risks making us far more complicit in deaths like that of Rubuntja than the mostly-hapless security guards and hotel managers – and police, health and other first respondents – who often find themselves having to try to prevent them at the ‘last minute’, as in this case.
The final point to openly (and a little helplessly) acknowledge – and it is striking, and (I think) causally important, too – is this one: nowhere in the extensive mainstream reporting on this case can I find confirmation of a matter of banal material fact: whether or not Malcolm Abbott is actually an Indigenous man. Nowhere. My assumption, however, is that Abbott is Indigenous. That’s based on all the known factors of this case I’ve been able in good faith to ascertain, and also (not least) in my view that were Abbott not Indigenous, that fact would have likely been openly and extensively reported. I am acutely aware of the offensive risks of stereotyping that are inherent in my assumption, but I think it’s a vital aspect to raise/seek to confirm. Because overwhelmingly the analytical commentary on this case from Indigenous DV experts – figures such as Dr Hannah McGlade – has revolved around the failure of the various ‘systems’ to properly alert Rubunbtja to her partner’s extensive and known violent history, a clearer awareness of which they argue (compellingly) would at least have given her a better capacity to make choices in her own interest. Again, the #MeToo movement has been consistent and loud in its advocacy of this ‘preventative’ measure, when it comes to non-Indigenous serial offenders’ DV histories. And I wonder if the apparent-reluctance of the press even now to clarify Abbott’s identity particulars – for fear of bulwarking stereotypes – mirrors/extends a now-ingrained ‘systemic’ reluctance to do so, too.
Can Crikey/Julia Bergin confirm whether or not Abbott is Indigenous, as the platform/reporter on the ground? Will you, publicly? And if it is the case, I wonder, too, if our collective, doubtless well-meaning, instinct now to vaguely ‘avoid mentioning’ such a fact is really serving the amelioration of Indigenous violence…or, again, risks becoming well-meaningly complicit in its continuance? If, on the other hand, Malcolm Abbott is not Indigenous, then that of course changes the worth (and tenor) of my comment entirely, and I will be more than happy to respond quickly and appropriately (including addressing the sobering implications of my own such assumption). But I hope at least that the better faith Crikey commentors, and Bergin herself, can appreciate the predicament presented by what seems to be a universal absence of reporting clarity, at this point, on that aspect of this tragedy.
I hope Crikerians can recognise how carefully I am trying to tread here. And I do think we all need to find a way at last to have these difficult conversations sensitively but clearly, without either such (potentially-condescending) tip-toing about or descending into a simplistic, polarised Culture War slanging match. Thanks all.
Overly verbose as usual but a nice exposition of the copious quantities of hypocrisy from all & sundry in ignoring the usual rampant herd of pachyderms starting, but not ending with personal individual responsibility from all involved.
How likely is it that Kumarn Rubuntja did not know Abbott’s history? Starting at zero and working down the Kelvin scale.
Then you go and blow it, even by your own terms of reference, by asking whether Abbott is Indigenous – what does that have to do with the price of fish? Or anything else?
Apart from the well documented fact that so many people can’t tell their own best interests from a hole in the ground?
It’s overly verbose mostly because I’m trying hard to avoid racialised offence. Abbott’s Indigenous identity – or not – and what appears (if the former case) to be an excessive effort to avoid mentioning it explicitly is surely of relevance, given the extent to which our wider discussions about male violence focus increasingly on male agency and responsibility. If there is a statistically higher rate of offence within a significant cohort, then not explicitly recognising that renders any meaningful response impossible. As I said the analysis of this specific – and egregious – case has turned largely on the perceived absence of awareness of the perpetrator’s history. OK, like you, so appalling was Abbott’s history that it’s difficult to grasp how some knowledge of it eluded a partner who was also an Indigenous anti-DV advocate, but that is to veer dangerously towards victim-blaming. I am far more interested in whether, and/or how much, an arguable systemic ‘complicity-of-silence’ – including from the media – about his identity might have added to the difficulty Rubuntja may have faced in calling out/removing herself from the risk he posed her. The question is if, and/or just much, a well-meaning intention to avoid explicitly labelling Indigenous male violence against Indigenous women what it is, for fear of exacerbating racist tropes, is enabling it to endure with relatively impunity…in the same way it did for most male cohorts for most of history, and still does with certain others still offered a degree of protection from scrutiny by other identity markers, at least arguably (and statistically).
Absolutely horrendous, Julia but thank you the article.
Gamble responsibly.
…
Anyone for booze?
Good article to accompany the one prior.
It’s great having Crikey supporting someone in town to report on this.
I haven’t seen any discussion at all on the role of the club to serve alcohol responsibly. Surely if the couple had been at the club for 7 hours and were heavily intoxicated, the club had some role in facilitating this state of affairs?