Former Labor senator Patrick Dodson has condemned the way Australia treats Indigenous children as a modern form of genocide, highlighting the country’s Aboriginal youth incarceration rates and child removals as an “embarrassing sore”.
Speaking to Guardian Australia, the Yawuru elder described the troubling figures as an “assault on the Aboriginal people”.
“It’s an assault on the Aboriginal people. I don’t say that lightly [but] if you want to eradicate a people from the landscape, you start taking them away, you start destroying the landscape of their cultural heritage, you attack their children or remove their children,” Dodson said.
Dodson told the publication there was no other word for it than genocide, adding: “It’s to destroy any semblance of any representation, manifestation in our nation that there’s a unique people in this country who are called the First Peoples.”
In 2024, nearly half (44 per cent) of all children in out of home care were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. Data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare also suggests First Nations children are 27 times more likely to be locked up than non-Indigenous children and young people.
Often referred to as the “father of reconciliation”, Dodson was the inaugural chair of the Reconciliation Council (now Reconciliation Australia), in the 1990s. He also served as a commissioner on the 1989 royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody, as chair of both the Central Land Council and the Kimberley Land Council, and as co-chair of the parliamentary inquiry into constitutional recognition.
He was nominated as a senator for Western Australia in 2016, and retired from politics last year due to ill-health.
With a returned federal Labor Government, he has now called for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to use the significant win to pursue three pillars set out in the 2017 Uluru Statement, that is, Voice, Treaty and truth-telling.
While the Voice referendum did not pass in 2023, Dodson stressed this doesn’t mean giving up on efforts, noting truth-telling and treaty-making can still happen through legislation if the government and people are committed.
He argued in favour of adopting the system of local and regional Indigenous advisory bodies, recommended by Indigenous leaders Tom Calma and Marcia Langton in their 2021 report to the Scott Morrison government.
“Whether they call it a voice or whether they call it a regional assembly … but an entity and that entity will have to be representative of the regional people. That way we can start to manage the awful incarceration rates of young people and the underlying circumstances that’s given rise to that,” Dodson told ABC’s 7:30 on Monday.
The former senator further remarked the reconciliation process is “bigger than a referendum” as he spoke to NITV on the eve of this year’s National Reconciliation Week.
“It’s up to us, we need to put pressure on and be smart about [it]. We can’t afford to let this opportunity pass us by and let down the legitimate and just claims of the First Peoples of this country to be recognised as the unique First peoples and to enable us, as a nation, to go forward,” Dodson said.
He described a significant opportunity for Australia to not dwell in disappointment but to “get on with it and put the challenge back to the parliamentarians”.
“But they’re not the only people responsible, we, the public, are responsible for how we go forward as much as the politicians,” he said.
“We, the public, can’t allow the Government to just walk away and forget the promises that they’ve made in the past and the need for this nation still to deal with the unfinished business.”
The Yawuru elder, whose traditional country centres around Broome, is the keynote speaker and featured Reconciliation Memoir, an annual event held by Reconciliation Australia in which they produce the memoirs of a longstanding champion of the reconciliation movement.
It marks the fourth instalment of the series, which began in NRW 2022 with former Liberal senator Fred Chaney OAM, followed by Noongar writer and songwriter Dr Richard Walley (2023), and a former head of Reconciliation WA, Carol Innes (2024).
In his Reconciliation Memoirs — written in conjunction with journalist Victoria Laurie — Dodson talks about his early life, stepping into public life, and becoming a leader in reconciliation.
A key reflection from the process of putting this together, he told Guardian Australia, is the way the country is yet to reckon with the legacy of dispossession and colonisation.
“It’s a great country, but it’s just that the First Peoples are not enjoying a lot of the greatness,” Dodson said.
“We should pick up and resolve these issues that are a blight on us as a nation. Our relationship with the First Peoples has not been settled, has not been agreed to between First Peoples and the nation and we’ve got to do that.”
Lead image: AAP
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