Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in support of this motion brought by Senator Thorpe to this place today. We all know the crippling and absolutely unacceptable overrepresentation of First Nations people in our justice system. I want to share some of those statistics today. In the September 2023 quarter, there were 14,183 First Nations prisoners across Australia. This is an increase from the June 2023 quarter, when there were 14,011. More than a thousand more First Nations people are in prison than in the September 2022 quarter because of the actions of frontline responders and of police across this country—and they are at the heart of the problem.

I acknowledge some of the points that senators who have already spoken have made—that these are all interlinked, interconnected, with some of the issues we are seeing in closing the gap. But we also have three very specific targets—targets 10, 11 and 12—that have been set out for this federal government to do something about, and the cries from across this country about how we do that and how we achieve that are going to need bold action. We cannot continue to sit in this place and the other and push the responsibility back on the states and territories. Across all jurisdictions, governments are given hundreds of millions of dollars, particularly in the area of policing.

I have sat and listened to how this money can be spent better in our communities. I have worked in academia. I have worked in the research area. I have listened to community consultations about justice reinvestment. What people are saying isn't about giving more money to the police or to white NGOs in communities. It's about giving community an opportunity to do what they need to with diverting those youth and investing in our people and addressing some of those underlying social issues and social causes which are at the core of this—housing, education, employment, health care, access to the basic services and necessities in our communities. We are living in Third World conditions in some of our jurisdictions. I don't want to hear people say that we got running water because of colonisation. That is not true. You can't even drink the water that's running in some of the communities in my home state of Western Australia. So that's a farce. We need to give up that game and stop buying into that rhetoric.

I am all for defunding the police. I am absolutely in support of that. Get them back to their core function and let them own the title of colonial police forces in this country. Let them own that title, because that's what they were put in place for. That's truth-telling. Police forces in this country are doing their damnedest to not give us justice. Justice means that we are judged by our peers. We are not judged by our peers when there are white magistrates, white juries, in this country, who are continuing to do the job. They are not our peers. We need to think fundamentally about the role of the justice system. I am referring to this as the justice pipeline, and it needs to be dismantled. Senator Liddle is absolutely right: child protection plays such a huge part. We are only two or three generations from the stolen generation. In some households, like mine, we are only one generation away.

On rehabilitation versus punishment in this country: rehabilitation is not happening. The current system is not rehabilitating anybody; it's a revolving door. That's what's happening in our communities, and there sure as hell is no pathway to making sure that people are actually getting the support and the help that they need in these institutions. It is appalling. There is Banksia Hill. There is Unit 18 in Casuarina Prison in my home state, where they used a riot squad on a 16-year-old boy who had a health crisis—Cleveland Dodd, who was the first child to die in custody. This is shameful. It's a shame and a stain on our history. (Time expired)