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

Today's Closing the Gap announcement tops off a year of betrayal. Once again, Labor is refusing to address the urgent issues facing First Peoples and confront their own role in harming our communities. They're refusing to address the suicide epidemic, the child removals and the incarceration rates, particularly of children. While there are welcome measures like increased access to affordable food in remote communities, the simultaneous funding for more police in these same communities is appalling, feeding with one hand and imprisoning with the other.

This time last year the Productivity Commission delivered a damning assessment of Closing the Gap, calling for a complete overhaul. A year later, things have only gotten worse. State and federal governments have repeatedly shown they lack any real commitment to justice for First Peoples. Worse still, governments are actively driving harm against us. State governments have doubled down on criminalisation, jailing and removing children, ripping more of our families apart. The latest data shows nearly one in 15 First Nations children are removed from their families. That is 24,000 children, and this number is growing each year.

Victoria is among the worst, with nearly one in eight of our children forcibly removed from their families. Even more troubling, the Northern Territory is moving to dismantle the child placement principle, a key recommendation from the Bringing them home report, pushing to rip apart our children and family culture and kin. This is not just an assimilationist attack; it's part of a continued genocidal effort to cut First Peoples from our cultures, communities and country. In September, Queensland again suspended its Human Rights Act, allowing more children to be locked up in brutal adult police watch houses. Victoria abandoned plans to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14. The Northern Territory lowered the age back to 10, reintroduced the use of spit hoods on children and relocated all children from Central Australia to Darwin, 1,500 kilometres away from their families, community and country.

Across the country, governments are increasingly locking our children in prisons where their bodies and human rights are routinely abused, yet the federal government remains silent. It looks away. It refuses to raise the age of criminal responsibility beyond 10 for federal crimes or do anything to push states to raise the age. The government is directing money for First Peoples to organisations such as police—$205 million of the announced $840 million Closing the Gap funding package goes to the cops. This doesn't benefit our people. It only means more of our people will be locked up, more of our children will be jailed and more lives will be destroyed. It is money for widening the gap.

The federal government must recognise that much of what our communities face results directly from the violence governments are perpetrating against First Peoples. It is now increasingly clear that the federal, state and territory governments have no real commitment to the Closing the Gap partnership. As an example, in November, Minister for Indigenous Australians, Senator McCarthy, met the state and territory ministers to discuss the crisis of First Nations children being jailed unsentenced. They're not even sentenced. The kids are in jail without even being sentenced. They're often in adult police watch houses.

The latest data shows that 83 per cent of First Nations children in prison have not been sentenced and the majority are never found guilty of an offence. The minister told them to take it up with their Attorney-General. What happened next made it clear that the partnership is broken and that no-one actually cares or listens to the federal Minister for Indigenous Affairs because Victoria's Labor Premier, Jacinta Allan, announced a review of bail laws designed to lock up more children. New South Wales Labor Premier, Chris Minns, extended harsh bail laws for children and boasted about jailing more of them. The WA and SA Labor governments passed more punitive laws, and in Queensland it's harder to get bail as a child than as an adult.

This system is killing our kids. In just the past 18 months, two children died in youth detention. Their deaths are directly attributable to a system that criminalises and brutalises instead of offering care and support. We know that children in the Ashley Youth Detention Centre in Tasmania have been strip searched—children being strip searched! They are subjected to isolation. Children are being isolated, beaten and sexually abused in the prison system while a systematic cover-up hid these abuses for decades and continues to hide them. All of your governments are hiding along with them. Similar abuses are documented across the country. It's telling that the National Children's Commissioner has been denied access to children's prisons in Victoria and WA, where conditions are known to be horrific.

Australia spends over $1 billion a year jailing children, yet there is no real commitment to transparency or accountability. The Senate supported my motion to report on prison conditions, addressing issues like self-harm, miscarriages, and stillbirths in custody, yet Labor refused to comply with its democratic duty. Governments continue to cover up the violence and abuse routinely perpetrated within the prison system, and then they turn around and blame us, like you just heard.

When it comes to legal assistance, a fundamental protection against injustice, Labor is failing again. An independent review revealed that the legal assistance sector was underfunded by $1 billion annually and recommended an additional $459 million per year from 2025 onwards. Labor responded with inadequate funding of just $500 million over five years, less than a quarter of what is needed. Aboriginal Legal Services called this a betrayal that does not reflect a government that believes in First Nations justice. Well, obviously, you're not about that at all. And remember, cops just got given $205 million which only increases the demand. Last year, I led a group of 28 crossbenchers in calling for stopgap funding to keep legal services afloat. Labor, again, ignored this.

Many of the problems we see reflected in the Closingthegap report point to breaches of Australia's international human rights obligations. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has repeatedly called out Australian governments for violating the convention. Legal experts presenting to the youth justice inquiry last week made it clear the federal government has the power to intervene, to enforce minimum standards on the states and to prevent these human rights abuses, aligning this country with our international human rights obligations. But they pick and choose when they want to follow UN obligations, and the federal government denies it has jurisdiction over these abuses. This is a lie.

The government is responsible for upholding international human rights obligations, and it has the constitutional power to do so. It is choosing not to act, hiding behind the fake excuse that this is all just a matter for the states and territories. The external affairs power under section 51 of the Constitution allows the government to implement international treaty obligations across all jurisdictions. This means the government could legislate to ensure compliance with the United Nations conventions that Australia has ratified. These powers have been used to enforce uniform sex discrimination laws across states and territories, under the Sex Discrimination Act. The government could do the same to prevent human rights abuses against children and First Peoples. It simply just won't act.

Self-determination is the only way forward. We don't need more overpaid commissioners for everything. You put up a commissioner for everything. We don't need any more reports being ignored, token advisory bodies that you keep setting up or sham partnerships that governments continue to breach. What we need is for governments to stop perpetrating violence against First Peoples, which drives more intergenerational trauma and dysfunction. We need them to respect our basic human rights.