First Nations Justice Network submission to the Senate Inquiry into Measuring Outcomes for First Nations Communities
14 March 2025
About the submission
This submission gifts to the inquiry the voices and stories of members of the National Community Legal Sector First Nations Justice Network. Network membership is open to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers from the national community legal sector movement. Members of the network have created this submission collaboratively with secretariat support from Community Legal Centres Australia. The knowledge informing this submission ranges from subject matter expertise including cultural, academic and legal perspectives, to deep historical and contemporary first-hand and personal and professional experiences of what is happening in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across this continent.
To prepare the submission, members of the National Community Legal Sector First Nations Justice Network met on five separate occasions to share stories and experiences, and to develop and refine the calls to action it contains collectively. Altogether, close to 30 network members participated in these meetings. Throughout the drafting process all members of the First Nations Justice Network, its sister network, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women’s Network, and state-based networks of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community legal sector workers in NSW and Qld, had access to and permission to edit the submission.
Submission introduction
This submission is a truth-telling document. It does not provide recommendations or open the door for further negotiation and dilution by governments of what we know needs to be done to improve outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities. It is a gift of cultural knowledge and expertise, and a call to action. We urge governments to listen deeply.
How many of us have been part of evaluations, research papers, providing recommendations to governments? It’s so deadly that we create pieces like this, but then they shimmy back up to government and all they do is say “we don’t actually have to do that because it’s just recommendations.”
What they do then is take the information that we have gifted to them, dissect it like a frog, take bits, move around and shift things, and then tell us that they’ve decided what they think is best.
So, we are no longer writing recommendations to negotiate with government. This is not negotiable. It’s a call to action. You cannot dilute the cultural context around such important work, we are telling you now that these are the actions that must happen.
I’m conscious of how many times as mob we’ve done this. We’re talking about Closing the Gap – but whose gap is it? It’s not my gap. It’s not our gap as Aboriginal people. It’s a systemic gap and it’s the government’s responsibility to start owning their wrongs, misinterpretations and perceptions around how mob should be doing our business.
Lisa Warner, Yankunytjatjara Woman,
Aboriginal Community Worker
The Stolen Generations never ended. The Stolen Generations – systematic removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from culture, and denial of self-determination – continue to this day, just driven by a slightly different legislative framework. It is this truth that underpins the worsening outcomes for First Nations communities.
The only real difference they’ve made today is not putting them in boys’ homes, but they still have resicare, so what’s the difference? I’m talking about boys’ homes because that’s where my pop was taken. They had girls’ and boys’ homes and now they just have resicare. It’s the same thing; it’s just got different words.
My pop was taken from Cowra Mission up to Kempsey Boys’ Home, Kinchela. It’s exactly the same, the stories he tells me and the stories I hear today. The only difference is there weren’t reports. Very few reports are made now, but they have some kind of checking mechanism. Nothing’s really changed, to be honest.
Serrina Kenny, Yuin, Wiradjuri and Dunghutti Woman, Solicitor
Some would refer to regression against Closing the Gap targets as a failure in systems. However, we see the system thriving as a well-oiled machine, doing what it was initially designed to do – remove children, assimilate, and ultimately eradicate First Nations people.
We’re still the cattle they’re making money off. We’re being used as part of a bigger system. A majority of the criminal and child protection systems are because of our people. Criminalising our people and removing our kids keeps people in jobs. Why can’t we create jobs in other areas that would be more supportive rather than dealing with things at the end?
We’re catching it as it gets to the point where someone’s committed an offence, when a parent is suffering from trauma. These things could have been prevented rather than dealing with things when they’re at the worst.
Serrina Kenny, Yuin, Wiradjuri and Dunghutti Woman, Solicitor
Under Closing the Gap Priority Reform 3, the Federal Government has an obligation to commit to “systemic and structural transformation of mainstream government organisations to improve accountability, and to respond to the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people”.1 It is not meeting this obligation. Governments continue to drive systemic inequity.
There is no equity on the basic foundations. We are asking for commitments on structural transformation to bring equity in access to finances, access to housing, access to education. Would we be in this situation with the number of kids removed, so many of our mob incarcerated, if there was equity there? They need to give as much funding as they do to putting us in prison, into those foundational things that would prevent prison.
It’d cost less for them to do the things that keep people out of prison than they spend putting us in. But for the moment, it’d be a bit of a budget deficit, because they’d need to do the work to keep people out first, while people are still in, so they’re not going to do that.
Bettina Cooper, Senior Financial Counsellor and
Strategy Lead, Mob Strong
This submission shares stories from First Nations people working in communities across the continent, in relation to the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, suicide rates, and adult incarceration. It explains these truths as evidence of the ongoing Stolen Generations and calls on the Federal Government to meet its obligation to deliver systemic and structural transformation for First Nations people.
There is no cure better than prevention. It feels like the government is saying ‘let’s create problems, and then we fix them with removal’ rather than preventing these problems to start with.
Christie Drummond, Dunghutti woman,
Family Violence & Care and Protection Advocate
working in the disability space
Calls to action
First Nations people have provided governments with hundreds of specific recommendations over many decades to reduce the numbers of our kids being stolen and placed in out-of-home care, reduce the rates of adults being incarcerated, and prevent suicides. And yet, governments consistently and systematically refuse to follow these recommendations, and we see these problems worsening.
We know the solutions, and so do governments. We are seeing regression on these Closing the Gap targets not because we don’t yet know the solutions, but because governments choose to pursue policies and practices that we and they know will worsen these problems.
We call on governments to meet their Closing The Gap obligations by delivering systemic and structural transformation for First Nations people. We call on governments to finally end the Stolen Generations, and to respect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ autonomy and self-determination.
Governments must act now to:
Support First Nations families to keep kids at home, in community and on Country by ensuring they have access to:
- Safe and stable homes
- Equity in employment, finances, healthcare and education
- Community-controlled and self-determined prevention, support, and healing services
- As many kinship care options as possible, through culturally appropriate reform of blue card and working with children check systems
- Free, culturally appropriate and independent legal advice from the point of first contact with child protection systems, guaranteed via legislation.
End the care to prison pipeline
- Raise the age of criminal responsibility to at least 16 across all jurisdictions
- Decolonise prison, policing and child protection systems
Support and adequately resource community-controlled healing centres in all communities
Commit to truth-telling and treaties.