David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

First, I want to acknowledge my colleague Senator Cox's contribution to this debate and echo and reinforce all of the words in her contribution. It's clear that, after decades and decades of government failures to close the gap, governments are still not actually listening to First Nations families. When will that change? Despite royal commission after royal commission, report after report, government policies are still literally killing First Nations peoples. When will we collectively say that another report is not the answer and enough is enough?

It's a fact that governments across this country continue to steal First Nations children from their families and take them away from their culture and country. Those same governments show up in chambers like this and claim they care about closing the gap. Despite what has ended up being many empty promises from politicians, despite the candles arranged outside of Parliament House in 2008, which blazed the promise of sorry, the first step, governments still aren't listening. As the Grandmothers Against Removal movement will say, if sorry means anything, it means don't do it again.

First Nations communities and organisations don't want more empty promises. They actually want action, empowerment, resources and self-determination. Removing a child from their family is often the first step down a path of a lifetime of injustice, trauma and long-lasting harm that spans lifetimes and generations. The appalling rate of removal of First Nations children is nothing other than a continuing act of violence against those families, with the so-called child welfare institutions across this country that are not culturally safe for First Nations families.

The ombudsman in my home state of New South Wales recently released a scathing report on the extent of my home state's child protection department and its failure to achieve or even persist with its five-year strategy to reduce overrepresentation of First Nations children in out-of-home care. The report found that the New South Wales Department of Communities and Justice failed to report transparently on what it did to implement its own strategy and in fact abandoned its own strategy halfway through. The ombudsman found:

It was apparent to us that at some point within its five-year timeframe, DCJ effectively abandoned the AOS. DCJ did not report on what had been achieved by the AOS in the time it was operating, and nor did it announce that the strategy was being abandoned or why.

They didn't even bother to implement their own strategy, and it shows, because between 2017 and 2022 the proportion of First Nations children in out-of-home care actually increased from 38.4 per cent in June of 2017 to 43.8 per cent in June of 22. I say again: if 'sorry' means anything, it means you don't do it again. You don't, as the New South Wales child protection system has done in the most recent five years, make the problem worse and take more First Nations kids proportionally than ever before.

As a state MP in the New South Wales parliament I introduced a Greens bill to prevent First Nations child removals or to at least radically reduce them. That was based on implementing the findings of the groundbreaking Family is culture report that looked at well over 1,000 First Nations child removal cases and came up with hundreds of recommendations. I only did so after a direct request from First Nations communities and organisations across the state who saw that there was no action happening from the state. We then worked together on the bill. Tragically, the Liberal-National government and Labor both refused to support the bill, which would have kept more families together and prevented at least a significant part of that trauma and tragedy of separation. The government could save lives today by implementing those reforms, by listening to communities and acting on them.

I want to turn now to another key failure across the country, which is the ongoing practice of locking up children. First Nations children as young as 10 years old, some still with their baby teeth, are still being locked up in brutal institutions where we know they are being tortured in territories and states across the country. When will we raise the age? When will we come together as a nation and commit to the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody? When will we finally start listening to, empowering and resourcing genuine self-determination for First Nations communities? That's how we close the gap.