Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A 23-year-old Aboriginal woman born brain damaged with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder is languishing in a Western Australian jail—in Kalgoorlie, in fact. She has been there 18 months. She has not been convicted of any offence. She was found incapable of pleading given her cognitive impairment. The problem, of course, is not a singular one; there are at least 30 Aboriginal Australians with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder in Australian prisons. I would argue, in fact, that there are probably many more but that they have gone without proper diagnosis. The very sad case for Rosie Anne Fulton is that she has lived the most horrendous life since her early days in Alice Springs, where she was abused from the earliest age. She wants to go back to be close to her family, but she has just recently been denied the possibility of going to a special care home in the Northern Territory around Alice Springs.

I want to draw attention to the foetal alcohol spectrum disorder condition. It is the biggest cause of at-birth permanent brain damage in Australia. It is 100 per cent preventable: if you do not drink while you are pregnant, there is no chance of your baby being born with cognitive impairment, brain damage and other physical impairments which are permanent and irreversible. We do not even mandate alcohol labelling in this country. We do have a national strategy. It requires being put into place, and I ask that this government move more quickly on putting the foetal alcohol spectrum disorder national program into place.