David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This week, as we meet in this chamber, the Northern Territory government is rushing dangerous changes to youth justice laws through its parliament. These are laws that we know will harm vulnerable children, that will not protect our community and that are contrary to all the evidence. They are getting away with it because the media focus is away from the Northern Territory; it's often on this place.

Let's be clear who will be targeted under these changes to NT laws. As we speak, 95 to 100 per cent of the children in NT jails will be First Nations kids. Look at the data. It has been consistent for years and years. Some nights, every child in an NT prison is a First Nations child. The changes that the NT government is seeking to ram through without even a skerrick of proper process include moving youth justice out of the Department of Territory Families, Housing and Communities and into the Department of Corrections. The symbolism is clear and intentional. They now see First Nations kids as criminals to punish, not children to help.

These reforms are also intended to remove from the Youth Justice Act in the NT the requirement that detention only be used as a last resort. I heard the Chief Minister this morning aggressively pushing this and saying that it now means judges can lock up children without trying community support, without counselling and without putting children and families through programs—celebrating lowering the bar, to put more and more kids in jail. They're also making it easier, when they put kids in jail—remember: they're almost always First Nations kids—to use restraints on kids in custody. And they're ensuring that childhood mistakes will follow children into adulthood.

This, from the Northern Territory government, is all about punching down. It's about blaming the most vulnerable and marginalised members of the community for systemic failures on housing, on jobs and on education. The NT Office of the Children's Commissioner has correctly said that these changes are not evidence based. But the Chief Minister in the Northern Territory, with almost no scrutiny, just blows those concerns off—blows off the concerns of land councils—and she doesn't seem to care.

Young people don't commit crimes because the punishment isn't tough enough. All the evidence tells us this. Children are committing crimes because of homelessness, family violence, mental health issues and being kicked out of schools. And racist laws seeking only to lock up traumatised kids will just make this worse.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Albanese announced a federal intervention into child care using Commonwealth funding powers to protect children. Good. But if the federal government can step in for day-care safety, why can't they act and intervene when a state or a territory is deliberately, consciously, harming vulnerable young people in their jurisdiction? These reforms abandon evidence; they ignore experts; and they will make our communities less safe, while traumatising children. It's not justice; it's political grandstanding at the expense of our most vulnerable young people.

I, like so many, have been horrified by the violence we are seeing in Syria. After a generation of violence, the people of Syria deserve peace. And it's always civilians who pay the price when governments and armed groups escalate.

The Syrian civil war saw people from every religious and ethnic group killed, displaced and traumatised, and there needs to be an end to the bloodshed. The targeting of ethnic and religious communities by extremists entrenches violence, and we know that the vast majority of Syrians want what we all want—peace. The new Syrian government must do everything in its power to end violence and conflict and to make sure that Syria, which is a diverse and multicultural country, is also one at peace.

Israel has only made this pathway to de-escalation harder with its bombing of Damascus. We've seen Israel being given, again, a blank cheque by the US, and, unfortunately, the Australian government. And that must stop. The Australian government, like all governments, needs to play a proactive role in protecting vulnerable communities, and, for us, that should mean raising the humanitarian intake to find an additional pathway for those who are being traumatised in Syria and are fleeing persecution, who have connections here in Australia.

I want to make particular note of the letter from the Druze community calling on the Albanese government to publicly condemn ethnic and religious violence; to demand independent international investigations into war crimes and religiously motivated massacres; to support humanitarian aid, with settlement programs for persecuted minorities and targeted sanctions against those responsible; and to engage the Syrian diaspora communities to help document crimes, raise awareness and support justice initiatives. We call on the Albanese government to listen to the community and we support these calls coming from the community.