Lidia Thorpe (Victoria, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The policing, surveillance, criminalisation, and detention of First Peoples children is a humanitarian crisis and the youth carceral system is operating in breach of this country's human rights obligations. Children need culture, country, connection, and family, not prisons. The billions spent on police, prisons and surveillance must be urgently re-invested into First Peoples self-determined community programs and services to provide appropriate wrap-around support to women, children, and families.

Since 1991, 33 First Nations children have been killed in custody that we know of. My thoughts are with those families. Losing a child is something no-one should have to go through. There are 17 prisons for children across this country, where our babies, some as young as 10, are held in horrific conditions, being abused, starved and tortured, in breach of all human rights obligations. Over 50 per cent of these kids are First Nations, when we are just three per cent of the population. These babies are being torn away from culture, country and everything they know, too far away for family to visit. As said by Dylan Voller, a survivor of torture at Don Dale, said, these are kids:

… from a beautiful culture, the oldest continuing culture in the world, with so much to teach about how we can live in harmony together and with the land. But … their elders have been pushed aside by a government hungry for land and power.

… the Australian government uses brutality against children for their own political ends.

The National Children's Commissioner, Anne Hollonds, said that decades of evidence show that harsh punitive measures go against all recommendations from across the world and do not keep the community safer. In fact, the states with the toughest youth crime laws are the ones with the biggest problems. The Standing Council of Attorneys-General has a report, which is in the hands of all of the state governments, clearly stating that locking up children will only cause more harm to the community. We know increased punitive measures do nothing to address the underlying social issues, yet this so-called progressive Labor government have a few native police officers in their ranks. Your own Marion Scrymgour is making disgusting calls to treat our kids even more harshly, when they are already being openly hunted, locked up and tortured, and then Senator McCarthy is giving black money to the police dogs, adding to the billions of dollars being spent on this racist system every single year. Native police in your own ranks—shame!

Imagine if instead these billions on police stations and prisons and police surveillance were reinvested into First Peoples self-determined wraparound community services to support our women, children and families. We know this works. Children need culture, country, connection and family, not prisons. We're talking about 10-year-olds! It is beyond time for the federal government to show leadership, to commit to real justice reinvestment, to raise the federal age of criminal legal responsibility and to comply with the human rights obligations they signed up to.