'Big Brother' to keep eye on Aurukun
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Office hours: council says residents need protection late at night. (AAP: Darren England/News Limited/Pool, file photo)
An Aboriginal community in far north Queensland has installed a 'Big Brother' style camera system in response to increasing crime levels.
The Aurukun Shire Council says it has spent $225,000 to install 18 cameras in the community to monitor local infrastructure which is constantly vandalised.
The cameras will be monitored by a professional security firm in Cairns.
Aurukun chief executive officer John Bensch says the system will be backed up by two security guards who will patrol the community after hours.
"If there is anything picked up then they will contact the night patrol and they will immediately attend to it," he said.
"The problem is the police station is just office hours manned.
"The community was really disturbed there is no police presence around after hours and that's when the problem started."
He says vandalism is on the rise because police are not keeping sly grog out of Aurukun.
"[Curbing] sly grogging is primarily the function of the police and they cannot get on top of it because their shifts at the most go to 11 o'clock at night."
Bill Rowlings from Civil Liberties Australia says the cameras are a major invasion of privacy.
"We are turning to big brother to monitor people by cameras and it is a privacy issue that really needs to be discussed," he said.
The Aurukun council says the cameras should be up and running by the end of the week.
