THE INJUSTICE DEALT TO INDIGENOUS PEOPLE IS A STAIN ON OUR WHOLE NATION 19 November 2015 It’s best to start with the straight facts. As we mark the 50th anniversary of the referendum that gave the Commonwealth the power to make laws for Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders and finally recognised them in the census, the plight of Australia's Indigenous people remains perhaps the worst blot on our prosperous nation. The injustice dealt to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is a stain on our whole nation, and it is a challenge to our whole nation. Through Coag, we will create a national coordinating body for collecting data and measuring progress. Aboriginal Australians are vastly over-represented in the prison population, and there have been more than 400 indigenous deaths in custody in the last three decades. The national shame of Indigenous injustice is proof for all Australians that it takes more than protests to lift people out of systemic failure and put them on the path to fairness. Aboriginal Injustice. We will work closely with state and local governments, through law enforcement agencies, corrections and community services. We know the reasons why, and it’s not because there are no “bad” non-Indigenous children in the Northern Territory. And too many women seeking help from family violence face significant legal, psychological and cultural barriers. A Shorten Labor government will work on co-operative justice targets in concert with Indigenous elders to break the cycle of offending and incarceration, Last modified on Wed 26 Oct 2016 18.58 EDT. Family violence is the number one cause of Aboriginal children being removed from their family and their community, and all the trauma and disruption to the social fabric this entails. But these cuts put pressure on every community legal centre, ramping up demand on facilities already under strain, many running on their own tight budgets and absorbing cuts themselves. Aboriginal Issues Today. Labor promises 'justice reinvestment' to reduce number of Indigenous prisoners, ‘We’re reinvigorating traditional knowledge’: Indigenous rangers in remote Australia, ‘Nowhere is the story of unfairness and diminished opportunity more clearly defined than in the justice gap between the first Australians and the rest of us.’. He also promotes community understanding of and respect for the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. Far from the front page and the nightly news, cuts like these rarely receive the media condemnation they deserve. And with the spirit that is here today I am confident that we won't. Mark Finnane* This article examines the hidden history of criminal justice in late colonial Australia by focussing on Aboriginal inter-se offending. An Aboriginal man leaving school is more likely to go to jail than university. The colonisation of Australia and development into a modern nation, saw explicit and implicit racial discrimination against Indigenous Australians. It is the prospect of satisfying … This problem stems from the racial divide … Aboriginal elder Phillip Naden was just 28 when he first donned the blue shirt. The battle to improve lives will be a prominent part of Reconciliation Week, which this year is also focused on another pivotal moment in contemporary Australian history, the High Court's Mabo decision. If we set new co-operative justice targets, if we listen and invest in what works, if we work together, I believe we can succeed where others have failed. And yet, all these years later, there is not a gap, but a chasm, in incarceration. As Australia’s leading social justice law firm, Maurice Blackburn’s Reconciliation Action Plan is critical in implementing our firm’s fundamental values. For individuals, an early stint in jail means you’re more likely to grapple with mental health issues or develop a substance addiction, and less likely to finish school, learn a trade or get a job. And just as importantly, we will be guided by the people who live the reality of the justice gap: community leaders, Elders and Aboriginal representative organisations. An opinion piece written in The Age on the 18th of November, 2009, Australian … Of the 44 referendums ever held in Australia, only eight have succeeded. In 1770 Captain Cook landed on Possession Island and began the dangerous story of Australia, which for Aboriginal peoples is filled with dispossession, disease, death and ongoing disadvantage. The re-imprisonment rate for Aboriginal young people is higher than the school retention rate.
In the Northern Territory of Australia, the white pastoralists (cattle and beef barons) presently stand poised to drive even deeper the hundred-year-old wedge that separates the Aboriginal people from their country. — Reuters pic. Today, Aboriginal women are one-third of our female prisoners. The Stars program adopts an approach similar to the successful Clontarf model, but designed specifically for female Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. The referendum was 50 years ago, but we still have far to go. For Aboriginal people it is an immediate felt experience. The continued lack of treaty with Indigenous Australians shows an ongoing denial of the prior occupation and dispossession of Indigenous people in Australia and a general … A Shorten Labor government will provide the resources for a long-term study of justice reinvestment in Bourke, to see what Australia can learn. Aboriginal community members of Narrogin, a small West Australian town 200km south of Perth, attribute a spate of suicides which occurred in 2008 to racism and discrimination. The absence of a treaty is at the very heart of the historical injustice in Australia. The movement has resonated particularly strongly with many in Australia, a country also wrestling with the legacy of racial injustice towards the country’s indigenous peoples. We cannot let it be said of modern Australia that the colour of your skin determines whether or not you end up in jail. As NAIDOC Week 2020 celebrations get underway across Australia, he says that remand takes children from their culture, communities and families, and warns that it is an “unacceptable injustice” if any child is remanded not because of the inherent risk presented by their offending, but because of our inability to provide the supports they need to grow strong … The response of the Country-Liberal Party government was to form a land holding corporation and to vest the title of stock routes and reserves in that body. Less crime and less punishment. This is not to say the efforts made, large sums invested and policies tried in the past five decades have not led to some improvements, but the persistent gap between outcomes for Indigenous Australians and the rest of the community is terrible across all measures, including life expectancy, health, employment, incarceration and education. “This made me realise that Australia has a long way to go in respecting and acknowledging the true custodians of the land”. An Aboriginal woman is 34 times more likely to be hospitalised as a result of family violence and 11 times more likely to die. Australian Injustice: The Aboriginal Legal Service. The pathway is elusive, but we know it must be there. We can never talk about community safety, without addressing the scourge of family violence. And it costs the taxpayer $292 a day to keep someone in prison. 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