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

I rise here and, first of all, acknowledge we're here on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land. My home and my beautiful office in Sydney are on beautiful Gadigal land, and I acknowledge all those First Nations peoples across this country who have fought for their land, to protect their land, to protect their kids and to protect their culture. We're here to see yet another report on Closing the Gap. I've got to tell you this: as I travel around this extraordinary country, I meet First Nations people struggling to protect their land, fighting for it to stop being by poisoned by radiation, strip mined for minerals and covered in military assets. I see them fighting to keep their kids at home, to not have them stolen by government departments, who this report says are stealing First Nations kids at a greater rate than ever. I don't hear them talking about a Closing the gap report.

When I read the Prime Minister's forward of this and I read through the Closing the gap report and I see a glossy picture of the Prime Minister smiling and grinning and slapping himself on the back for making a positive difference and congratulating Labor for its partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, I think about the communities I met in Alice Springs who said, 'Why is the federal government paying for 60 per cent of every spit hood that's put on First Nations kids in the Northern Territory?' I think about the mums and grandparents I've heard grieving for the fact that their kids and their grandkids are still being stolen. I think about the extraordinary young First Nations women I met in Sydney just last week who were desperately trying to find community driven solutions for what they said—when I asked a room full of young First Nations women about government, I asked them: 'What do you think when you think about federal government? What do you think when you think about government?' Do you know what they said? They just said, 'Racist.' It was the first thing they said. I asked them about how they felt about parliament, and they said that they just weren't connected to parliament and that what they saw from governments—they saw police and they saw their families being targeted. That's the lived experience. It's not some glossy, smiley prime minister they think about when they think about government. They think about cops knocking on their door. They think about the fact that, if you walk down the streets of my home town of Sydney and you're a young First Nations person, you're likely to get stopped and searched and targeted and profiled.

This report shows that the Labor government is just refusing to take on the states and territories. I want to give credit to the First Nations minister who says that, of course, the federal government should use its fiscal power and should say to states and territories who are putting more kids in jail and driving up First Nations incarcerations, 'No Commonwealth money is going to come without strings attached, and you can't spend Commonwealth money putting more kids in jail, and Commonwealth money can't be spent on spit hoods or torturing First Nations kids.' Let's have that in the next report, not a smiley, slap on the back from the Prime Minister when he dared go out to go out and talk with communities. If he went out and heard the reality, if he spoke to those young women I spoke to in Sydney just last week, he'd know that the glossy brochures aren't cutting it. Let's close the gap. Let's close the gap by stopping stealing First Nations kids. Let's close the gap by not criminalising First Nations young people. Let's close the gap by not profiling First Nations people as they walk down the street by racist cops across this country, because that's the lived reality. And let's close the gap by giving back land, giving back resources and giving back wealth—by self-determination. Let's close the gap not with brochures but with action.