Ged Kearney (Cooper, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Skills) Share this | Hansard source

Let me begin by making the most important acknowledgment of all, and that is that I speak to you on Aboriginal land. I pay respects to elders past, present and emerging, and speak to you with humility on these lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people: a proud people, who have survived all challenges over the decades and have prospered. This land is stolen and was never ceded.

I want to thank the member for Fenner for his incredibly important work on the subject of Indigenous incarceration. I also want to acknowledge the member for Barton and Senators Dodson and McCarthy. In our First Nations voices, solutions lie. I am committed to listening to their voices, because in their voices we will find the answers. I speak with humility on this topic because I cannot pretend to know the indignity and the suffering that First Nations peoples have endured since the colonisation of this ancient land.

Colonisation brought the arrival of disease, the expulsion of peoples from their traditional lands and the separation of children from their parents. The loss of identity and the marginalisation of entire communities decimated our First Peoples. This is what Prime Minister Keating acknowledged when he spoke at Redfern in 1992 and declared that the starting point must be:

… to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.

It begins, I think, with that act of recognition.

Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing.

A year before Keating gave the speech, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody recommendations were released, a seminal report which my friend Senator Dodson worked on. It's been 28 years since this report was released, yet the vicious circle that drives overrepresentation of Indigenous Australians in our justice system continues. There have been over 400 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody since the 1991 royal commission. Among Indigenous men born in the 1970s, almost one in four has spent time in prison. Nine-tenths of Indigenous men from WA born in the late 1970s have been arrested, charged or summonsed by police. An Indigenous man is 15 times more likely to be imprisoned than a non-Indigenous man. An Indigenous woman is 21 times more likely to be in custody than a non-Indigenous woman. An Indigenous child is 25 times more likely to be in detention. Those statistics should horrify every single person that hears them.

Just weeks ago, Kumanjayi Walker, an Aboriginal boy, was killed, and a police officer has been charged with his murder. Nine papers reported: 'No emergency or even general health facilities were available that night in the town.' This should sting every one of us. It should make us sit up and pay attention. It's a story that too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities face with their interaction with the justice system, and too often this interaction ends tragically.

Nowhere is the story of unfairness and diminished opportunity more clearly defined than in the justice gap experienced by First Nations peoples. It is unacceptable. For too long our justice system has failed First Nations peoples. As parliamentarians, I think we sometimes struggle to know how to fix it, but we actually have a very good guide to how we reduce Indigenous incarceration. In 2018 the Australian Law Reform Commission produced the Pathways to justice report. The ALRC made 35 recommendations towards systemic reform of how the justice system deals with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Their findings came from 11 months of research, 149 consultations and more than 120 submissions. This government, a third-term government, has not yet responded to it. It's not acceptable to ignore this issue.

In tackling the entrenched disadvantage faced by First Nations people in the justice system, we must be guided by those who live the reality of the justice gap, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their community-controlled and representative organisations. I have had the honour of meeting a number of times with the organisation Change the Record, which includes the wonderful young Jessica Peters, an Aboriginal woman who has experienced the justice system firsthand. They are part of the solution. Change the Record are demanding that we do not let another generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people lose their futures, their dignity and, for some, their lives because of inaction by the Australian government.

My seat, Cooper, which is on the lands of the Wurundjeri people, is named after William Cooper, the trailblazing activist who spent his lifetime working to advance Aboriginal rights. In 1935 William Cooper wrote to the King, asking that the Aboriginal people be given a voice. Today, almost 85 years later, we're still fighting to achieve that. We need constitutional recognition, enshrining in it a voice to parliament. We need to keep the process of reconciliation alive. And we need makarrata, a treaty and truth-telling and healing, because, until our communities can reconcile a joint narrative about the history of this country, we cannot be truly reconciled.

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