Australia's Prime Minister has been urged to raise the minimum price of alcohol to curb addiction among aborigines.

Cheap booze is blamed for fuelling a crime wave in the Northern Territory town of Alice Springs, which is a popular tourism destination in Australia .

But it is even more of a draw for indigenous people because it is one of the few places where they can buy alcohol legally.

The Australian government banned alcohol from remote aboriginal communities in 2007 as part of a range of draconian measures to tackle alcoholism, child abuse and domestic violence.

Signs on the outskirts of towns proclaim them as a "Prescribed Area" where is it is an offence to possess supply or sell alcohol. The maximum penalty for a first offence is $110 (£70).





Some 18 new police stations opened in isolated towns to ensure there were officers present to trace illicit alcohol or act as a deterrent. Alcohol is also banned from the town camps on the outskirts of Alice Springs where almost all aboriginal families live.

But it is perfectly legal to buy it in the many supermarkets or off-licences in the centre of town, and with cheap wine available for around £1.50 a bottle, the alcohol problem has now shifted from remote areas to the only large town for hundreds of miles.

Aboriginal families will move en masse to stay with relatives in Alice Springs, spend all their money on alcohol, and then cannot afford to get home again.





To pay for their addiction many turn to crime; muggings and break-ins became so regular earlier this year that local businesses bought TV advertising to try to shame the government into action.

Most Australian towns with a population of just 25,000 would rely on just a handful of police officers. Alice Springs has 150, and extra officers had to be drafted in to cope with the crime wave.

The head of policing in the town Superintendent Michael Murphy told Sky News how they had targeted drinkers: "For a short period of time we ended up tipping out 2500 litres of alcohol and we arrested or apprehended about 1300 people for protective custody."





But keeping people locked up until they sober up is only a short term solution and there have been calls for the minimum price of alcohol to be raised to tackle the problem.

John Boffa, a local GP is one of the leading voices in the campaign. He said: "We need decisive, evidence based action to address the problems. And the key evidence based policies which work are reducing alcohol supply.

"We have to turn down the tap and we haven't done it affectively up to now. If we can get rid of cheap wine and shift all the heavy drinkers, particularly young people, to beer, that will make a very big difference.

"And an alcohol floor price is the most effective way of doing that, a minimum price for alcohol."

Barbara Shaw is an aboriginal activist who campaigns against the government's intervention policies because they were imposed solely on indigenous people, but she knows only too well the problem of alcoholism within her community.





She told Sky News: "When alcohol was first given to aboriginal people they were never taught how to drink. They just saw the white man drink, and the white man acted crazy and so they did the same.

"And with alcohol it's just got worse. I used to be a really bad anti-social person when I was under the influence of alcohol and drugs."

The problem has eased a little in recent weeks, but only because colder winter weather is a deterrent to being out on the streets.

But tourists are warned of the dangers of being out after dark, and on checking into our hotel we were informed by the receptionist that a 16-year-old girl had been stabbed nearby.





Out on patrol with the police was a very different experience to the alcohol-related problems of British towns.

There were no rowdy pubs with customers spilling out onto the streets. Instead, drinkers loitered around outside supermarkets waiting for friends or relatives to emerge with alcohol and then scurrying off into the darkness to find somewhere to drink where they wouldn't be caught.