Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the emergency motion moved by Senator Nampijinpa Price. There is no doubt that what is happening and has been happening for some time in Mparntwe—Alice Springs—is a crisis. It's a crisis that stems from a lack of access to basic human rights: housing, employment, education, health care, land and self-determination. It's a crisis that will not be solved by an intervention 2.0 approach—a top-down approach that ignores the dispossession at the heart of the crisis and perpetuates colonial oppression. The solutions must be holistic, self-determined, and community led.

First Nations communities know what is needed; the government just hasn't been listening. Communities need funding for housing to address homelessness and overcrowding. Community-led health services are best placed to deliver effective prevention and health-promotion programs, mental health services, and healing places. Communities need a significant investment in growing the First Nations health and wellbeing workforce that will build capacity within communities for effective prevention and health promotion programs, mental health services, and healing places.

Communities need access to culturally appropriate child care, education and employment opportunities. Governments must address the human rights crisis of imprisoning children in this country by raising the age of criminal responsibility. Labor must implement the outstanding recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the Bringing them home reports, which have shamefully sat on the shelf for decades.

We welcome the funding commitment to the Tangentyere Women's Council for education work, but communities need long-term, ample funding for frontline women's safety services, and urgent progress on a standalone First Nations plan to end violence against women and children that is designed and implemented by First Nations women. And, of course, we must progress truth-telling and Treaty to start to heal this country, and a voice to ensure that First Nations people are driving the solutions.