Incarceration rates amount to to ‘genocide’

Aboriginal activist and former Labor senator Patrick Dodson has condemned the Australia’s youth incarceration rates and child removals as an ongoing genocide against First Peoples.

Mr Dobson has described the action as an “embarrassing sore” on the nation.

“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,” Mr Dodson said.

“This is a way to get rid of a people.”

He added that the only word to describe it was “genocide”.

“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,” he said.

Indigenous families are grossly over-represented in child removal statistics.

In 2024, more than 44 per cent of all children in out of home care were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.

Aboriginal children make up more than 60 per cent of all children in care in WA.