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

I rise to contribute to this adjournment debate. In August, the Premier of Queensland, Annastacia Palaszczuk, said that the government that she leads is committed to developing a treaty with our people. Then, just last week, she announced a knee-jerk policy that will entrench First Nations kids, in particular, in the quicksand of the criminal legal system, because News Corp, the real Premier of Queensland, wants it so. For our people, an encounter with a police officer is often not helpful but lethal. Over 445 of us have died in police or prison custody in the last 30 years. Our people have not forgotten that the very police services that control the government of Queensland and even my own state of Victoria were the ones that came to steal our babies from their mothers, creating the stolen generations, something that is still happening today. It was these very police services that enslaved our men in chain gangs, shackling them to each other by the neck and the waist—a practice that continued up until the sixties.

Instead of working with us, like she says she wants to, the Premier of Queensland is sending police officers into schools in Cairns to target children. We don't yet know if these officers will be armed or not—this, after Australia's governments were condemned by the United Nations for our barbaric practice of targeting and jailing children as young as 10 in this country. Let's be honest here. What the Premier of Queensland is doing is not about community safety; it's about building the biggest school-to-prison pipeline that she can get away with. In Queensland, kids, our kids in particular, will be shackled again, except the colonial neck braces have now given way to ankle monitors. The Premier of Queensland—because News Corp told her so—also wants to remove the presumption of bail for a lot of young people, as well as giving cops portable metal detectors to randomly check for weapons. We all know who will be most affected by these changes: First Nations children. Forty-three per cent of children in prisons in Queensland are First Nations kids, despite our people making up only four per cent of Queensland's population.

The Premier isn't serious about doing the things that work, because she's more interested in racing the LNP to the bottom and in keeping News Corp happy. A premier that actually wanted to prevent youth offending from becoming devastating tragedies would keep the kids out of the endless cycle of criminalisation in the first place. GPS-enabled shackles or throwing kids in watch houses will not do this. A caring premier that was interested in doing the things that work would be making sure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children's legal services had the resources they need to keep our kids out of the criminal justice system—or the criminal legal system, because you don't get justice in that system. A good premier would be moving heaven and earth to do these things—like the Premier of Queensland did for Adani coal, extinguishing Wangan and Jagalingou native title for a coalmine, a dirty coalmine. Instead of backing and promoting better opportunities for our kids, she just wants to lock them up.

We need culturally appropriate housing. We need better mental health services and family support services for everyone everywhere. A premier with a spine would be raising the age of legal responsibility to at least 14 and implementing strong, culturally safe diversion programs. The Premier of Queensland should be ashamed of saying she wants a treaty with our people while also implementing policies that will hurt our kids even more. That is not a treaty. That does not create peace. That creates more harm and locks up more of our kids.