We need you in this fight for the long haul

It is, however, disheartening that it required the death of a black man in the USA, and the resulting widespread riots in that country, to jolt Australia from its customary inertia on the issue.

It is almost as if Australians have been politely waiting for permission to be outraged.

I have been actively involved for more than three decades, in other words since well before the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, in seeking to have this issue addressed. The royal commission sought to do that and made a total of 339 targeted recommendations.

While the recommendations have notionally been accepted by all governments in Australia, they have not, in the main, been implemented. To the extent that it is claimed that individual recommendations have been adopted, the claimed implementation is usually tokenistic or simply untrue.

That there have been 432 Aboriginal deaths in custody since the royal commission is stark evidence of the abject failure of states and territories to take its report or the issue seriously.

Sadly, two of the most recent of those deaths were of Steven Freeman and Jonathan Hogan, young Aboriginal men born and raised in Canberra. They were us.

In her report on the inquest into the death of Jonathan Hogan, NSW Deputy Coroner Harriet Grahame noted that Jonathan's death was symbolic of Australia's failure to grasp the "shockingly disproportionate" rates of Indigenous imprisonment. She said: "Quite simply, more young Aboriginal citizens like Jonathan must be diverted away from the criminal justice system if we are to reduce the number of Aboriginal deaths in custody." She also noted: "His death is properly understood in its context of social injustice and dispossession."

In a similar vein, Senator Patrick Dodson, in a speech in the Senate on June 10, said: "Thirty years have passed [since the royal commission] and we have not addressed the underlying issues that give rise to people being taken into custody and consequently dying in custody. So the social factors of health, housing, education and employment have not been addressed in a manner to relieve this awful blight on this nation's history."

Senator Dodson concluded with a plea for this issue to be made a top priority. He said: "For too long there have been nice words and good intentions, but lack of action and commitment."

Senator Dodson's censure is as relevant to the situation in the ACT as in any other jurisdiction in Australia. The Productivity Commission's Report on Government Services 2020 reveals that the ACT continues to have the highest ratio of age-standardised rates of Aboriginal incarceration, and the second-highest crude rates of Aboriginal incarceration, in Australia. The Productivity Commission reveals that the Aboriginal prison population in the ACT has increased in the period from 2009-10 to 2018-19 by 279 per cent. This rate of increase in Aboriginal incarceration is the highest in Australia, almost as twice as high as the second-highest rate of increase, and five times higher than the average across all jurisdictions.

To add to this catalogue of shame, the number of Aboriginal women currently imprisoned in the ACT is five times higher that it was five years ago.

As Senator Dodson said, in order to address the disproportionate incarceration of Aboriginal people in Australia the utmost priority has to be given to addressing the scandalous gap in outcomes and opportunities for Aboriginal peoples in areas as fundamental as health, housing, education and employment.

So what then does a quick audit of progress in the ACT in relation to these issues tell us? Firstly, on the basis of the admittedly limited information available, as many as 35 per cent of Aboriginal children in Canberra live in poverty.

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A quick audit would also reveal, as mentioned above, that the ACT locks up, on a relative basis, more Aboriginal people than any other state or territory in Australia. We are the champions. The Closing the Gap Report tabled by Scott Morrison in February this year advises that, for the first time since targets were set a decade ago, the ACT did not meet its targets for closing the gap in literacy and numeracy. It also reveals a reduction in 2018-19 in the proportion of Aboriginal residents in the ACT in employment.

In relation to housing, the ACT is the only state or territory in Australia which does not have an Aboriginal housing plan or strategy. The health status of Aboriginal residents of Canberra mirrors that of Aboriginal people across the nation, including in relation to the disproportionately high number of members of the community with diagnosed mental health and substance use issues. Oh, and the ACT has the second-highest rate of removal of Aboriginal children from their family and in out-of-home care.

There is a crisis in Australia, led in fact by the ACT, in the imprisonment of Aboriginal peoples. It is unarguably the most serious human rights issue facing Australia. It demands a genuine commitment from all of us to ensure that this ugly and festering legacy of the dispossession of the First Nations people of this country is fully and finally resolved.

To achieve this will require a concerted and sustained effort. As I said, the recent focus on black deaths in custody is welcome. Excuse my cynicism, but I have seen similar periodic outpourings of conscience and passion from the non-Aboriginal community over the years, indeed decades, and to be blunt virtually nothing has changed. After a short while, with conscience salved, the passion and determination simply washes away, to the relief of governments, but leaving my people bereft, disillusioned and possibly even worse off. If you are not serious, if you are not in it for the long haul, if your advocacy and activism is time-limited, if you don't think that black lives matter 365 days of the year, then you do know, don't you, that absolutely nothing will change.

Other, of course, than that, Canberrans can now enjoy Reconciliation Day at the beach.