Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

This Saturday marked 13 years since Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to Australia's stolen generations. First Nations people waited a long time for that apology, an event which recognised the hurt and pain inflicted on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as a result of government policies and practices which removed children from their families, their country and their culture.

This chamber ought to be painfully familiar with the numbers which describe Indigenous disadvantage. As my colleague Senator Dodson pointed out in his remarks earlier, the shocking truth is that, as horrifying and unjust as these numbers are, the indicators are worse again for stolen generations and their children, their grandchildren and their siblings. A 2019 report from the Healing Foundation sets this out. When compared to other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, stolen generations are 50 per cent more likely to be charged by police, 15 per cent more likely to consume alcohol at risky levels and 30 per cent less likely to report being in good health.

Of course, the trauma of forced removal and family break-up has enduring consequences for First Nations families, and they are wideranging. They are impacting men, women and children. The mechanisms by which this trauma is transmitted may be complex, but the indicators are straightforward. Three in five Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women have experienced physical or sexual violence by a male intimate partner, and First Nations women are 32 times more likely to be hospitalised due to a family violence assault and 10 times more likely to die from a violent assault than other women.

Last week I spent a couple of days in Bundjalung country in the Northern Rivers, talking with workers who support First Nations families. I spoke to workers in legal centres, in refuges, in housing organisations and in family service organisations. I thank the workers at Bugal Nah, Bunjum, Jarjum preschool, the Northern Rivers Women's Domestic Violence and Court Advocacy Service, Rekindling The Spirit and Jali, because all of them took time with me to explain their perspective on what it meant for them as First Nations people to work in their community to drive solutions to the problems that they perceive and to leverage their knowledge of country, culture and family to bring local solutions to local problems.

These people were inspiring and also moving. Some of the stories were very hard to hear. But these people are moving forward, doing everything they can in their communities to lead in their communities and to take on difficult issues. But their optimism—and they are optimists—was tempered by a kind of despair too, because the resources available to these people in these communities blighted by missions, racism, removal and cruelty are so limited.

Women's Safety New South Wales found that frontline Aboriginal domestic and family violence specialist services had reported a significant increase in client numbers since the beginning of COVID-19, including an increase in the complexity of cases before them. Workers in the Northern Rivers told me that what they urgently need is long-term affordable accommodation. But none of the government's safe places grants went to the Northern Rivers, despite there being many applicants, and the actual story is that this is forcing women to either stay living with perpetrators or face down homelessness for themselves and their children. These workers are saying so clearly that they want to lead. They want to lead in their own communities to heal families, to heal communities and to respond to violence, and they want to be given the power and the resources from government to develop their own solutions. They want to do it their way.

One of the first acts of the Morrison government after the 2019 election, after being re-elected, was to cut the funding for the National Family Violence Prevention Legal Services Forum. It is the only peak body specifically tasked with representing services working to prevent and respond to domestic and family violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It plays an essential role in ensuring that the voices and views of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children are heard in our national conversation, and the Morrison government should give this forum the sustainable funding that it needs to continue this important work. We cannot continue to ignore the compounding effect that racism and gender inequality have in exacerbating levels of violence, and ending violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women must be a national priority. Every single Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander woman, man and child deserves to live a life free from violence and fear and to thrive, secure in their culture and identity.

We all have a role in play in closing the gap. What that really means is listening to, supporting and empowering First Nations communities. For services, that means empowering First Nations to lead in the design and the delivery of the services in their own communities. This will require us to do things differently and to understand that power might need to be devolved to others and that decisions might be taken elsewhere. It also means listening to First Nations people when they give us some very specific guidance—a very specific invitation about how they want to enact this vision for their own leadership. The Uluru Statement from the Heart represents one of the most important such invitations in a very long time. Labor is committed to implementing the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full. We are committed to a constitutionally enshrined voice and a makarrata commission to oversee agreement, treaty making and a national process of truth telling.

First Nations people have told us of the torment of their powerlessness. It is time for us to truly respond. I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.