Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is harrowingly frustrating, given the fact that Indigenous Australians are dying 17 years younger than all other Australians due to a lack of medical care and facilities, proper housing and good education, that that was not seen as a national emergency a decade ago and that it took one of a number of reports on the plight of Indigenous children to trigger this. Mind you, the recommendations of the report on the plight of the children have been ignored in this process—the one on consultation with Indigenous people in particular—and too much of a political point has been made of the distress. We have yet to see how the government is going to handle that particular problem. Let me reiterate this: there are no facilities—zip—in Northern Territory jails, which currently house 900 people, a number of them for sexual offences, to help people overcome the problems which have put them into those jails. I hope the government is looking at that very difficult end of the process. Locking people up without helping them to take a different path into the future is a very wasteful exercise for society as a whole.