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

I want to thank Senator Thorpe for bringing this motion to the chamber, and I start by joining with my party leader, my colleague Senator Waters, in expressing our deep and sincere condolences and our sympathy to the family of Kumanjayi White. Kumanjayi was a 24-year-old Warlpiri man living with disability. He went into Alice Springs to seek care and services. While he was there seeking care and services—a story that happens so often around this country—being a First Nations man in a shopping centre on a public street, he found himself 'restrained'—I think that's the language the Northern Territory police used—by two Northern Territory police in the confectionery aisle of Coles, and, as so often happens in interactions between First Nations peoples and police forces across this country, the interaction was lethal and Kumanjayi was killed as a result of the police actions, the restraint that he suffered. Did I mention that he was a 24-year-old man, a young man going to Alice to seek access to care and services? What he got was death by police in the confectionery aisle of a Coles supermarket.

Our thoughts and our hearts are with his family and the community. There is just so much sorry business in this country, and so much of it happens at the hands of the criminal justice system—or, as First Nations people will tell you, the 'criminal injustice system'—that this country has. There have been more than 600 deaths of First Nations people at the hands of the criminal justice system since the royal commission, and there are hundreds and thousands of deaths that predate that. In my home state of New South Wales, tragically, I've worked with so many families who have had their boys, their husbands, their sisters, their aunties or their cousins killed at the hands of police. I still remember the appalling way in which David Dungay was treated. He was killed by police restraint in Long Bay prison in Sydney. In the video that you see of David, who was restrained by police because he was eating a packet of biscuits, he's crying, 'I can't breathe; I can't breathe; I can't breathe; I can't breathe,' and a mob of corrections officers are forcing him down—he can't breathe; he can't breathe—until they killed him. To see that history being repeated in the NT, in the confectionery aisle of Coles, is obscene. Tane Chatfield, Dwayne Johnstone, Tammy Shipley, TJ Hickey, Veronica Saunders—these names. Families, aunties—the pain of this sorry business at the hands of the criminal justice system reaches across this country into First Nations families.

And, while we have been in this parliament for the last two weeks, the racist criminal justice system in the Northern Territory has ratcheted up. The Northern Territory government, instead of responding with compassion and empathy and care, are refusing to institute an independent inquiry into Kumanjayi's death. Police investigating police—we know where that will end. Instead of meeting with the Commonwealth government and seeking the funding so support can go into First Nations led community services, diversion services and culture services—which all the evidence says will keep communities safe, keep young First Nations kids safe and instil pride and spirit—what has the Northern Territory government done this week? They have rammed through legislation to reintroduce spit hoods on kids, which the UN has said is torture. They've rammed through legislation to remove 'jail as the last resort' and to encourage magistrates and judges to put kids in jail. As Senator Waters made clear, the statistics say that tonight pretty much every kid in a Northern Territory jail will be a First Nations kid.

What has the Commonwealth done? Nada; zip; nothing. The Commonwealth government funds the Northern Territory government, by and large, to torture kids in jail. The Commonwealth government funds the Northern Territory government to not put in place independent investigations of deaths in custody. Action, Commonwealth action, using funding and legislative powers to try and do what we can to keep First Nations people safe—that's what's needed.

Question agreed to.