Lidia Thorpe (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak to the failing Closing the Gap statement on the anniversary of the apology to the stolen generations. By now we are getting used to what this report contains year after year—the so-called gap between First Nations people and non-First Nations people in this country. The gap is not closing but actually widening in a number of areas.

One of these areas is the removal of our children, the stealing of our children. Another one is suicide. These are not separate from each other. You cannot take a child from its mother without causing trauma. You cannot remove a child from a family, from a community, from its culture, from country without causing lasting, deep and intergenerational trauma. My people are dealing with this trauma every day. This is why I have not stopped calling on the government to fully implement the recommendations of the Bringing them home report. My own mother was a commissioner on that report, and I will keep the pressure on day-by-day until we finally see action.

You don't need to go out looking for new solutions. The solutions have been there for 26 years. Just on the weekend, on Sunday, I was asked to support a young single mother with a disability who had just given birth, and shortly after, her baby was taken away—a baby that belongs with its mother. These first hours, days and weeks are essential to forming bonds between mother and baby to establish breastfeeding and so much more. You can't get that back.

The so-called child protection in this country is many times more likely to remove a black child than a white child when all other circumstances are the same. It is done with such good intentions! Well, those good intentions are destroying our families and communities. It is a continuation of the stolen generations and it is also an act of genocide—genocide, in this country. According to the UN, genocide is a crime 'committed with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part'. Taking our children is an intent to destroy us as the First Peoples of this country. It is an act of genocide.

What our families need when struggling from systemic oppression is support. This support should, wherever possible, be provided by First Nations community-controlled organisations in culturally safe ways. I cannot tell you enough about how amazing Grandmothers Against Removal are. No-one supports them. You don't hear their voice. Even government departments deny a meeting with the elders, the grandmothers who are fighting to get our children out of this system. They have safely and caringly supported and kept babies and mothers together with no support, with no funding. Real support cannot be provided by just another one of your colonial institutions, where blackfellas don't feel safe and at every moment feel like they are doing something wrong, in not fulfilling another one of your colonial criteria, and are risking being reported and having their child taken.

If Labor is serious about its former Prime Minister's apology, where it has a morning tea and celebrates 22,000 Aboriginal children in out-of-home care, then it should look deeply into the practices of the system that has been created to destroy First Nations people in this country. You're attacking our children and the mothers and the fathers of these children. When are you going to implement the recommendations from the Bringing them home report, which provides you with all of the self-determining solutions from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices that you so care about? What do you say about 22,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids in out-of-home care? Do you say sorry again?