One of the Northern Territory’s highest-profile female Aboriginal leaders has told a parliamentary inquiry into racism against Indigenous Australians the nation failed the five-year-old Warlpiri girl known in death as Kumanjayi Little Baby and her mother.
In brief and sharp remarks on Friday, Central Land Council deputy chair Barbara Shaw ensured the federal inquiry into “racism, hate and violence directed at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people” does not forget that a litany of service providers and government agencies knew for years that Kumanjayi Little Baby and her mother were living in dire circumstances.
“The system actually failed her (Kumanjayi Little Baby) as an Aboriginal person in this country and as a victim,” Ms Shaw said.
“And also the mother. You know, the system failed them.”
Ms Shaw, a former co-ordinator of the Tangentyere Women’s Family Safety Program targeting family violence in Alice Springs town camps, did not say in her testimony that mother and daughter had lived with family violence (the little girl as a witness and the mother as a victim).
The facts were well known to government agencies and service providers in a group that meets regularly in Alice Springs called the Family Safety Framework. And details were made public at an Alice Springs court hearing in May, when a prosecutor set out the long history of family violence offences committed by Kumanjayi Little Baby’s father, Raphael Granites, against her mother.
The Central Land Council’s submission to the racism inquiry draws attention to the scourge of family violence in Indigenous communities. Parliament’s joint standing committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs held an inquiry hearing in Alice Springs on Friday.
The CLC, which has 90 elected delegates to represent more than 24,000 Aboriginal people in Central Australia, acknowledges that NT coroner Elisabeth Armitage described NT policing as highly challenged in part because of “a horrific rate of domestic family and sexual violence (DFSV), the ferocity of attacks (mostly on female victims) and the aftermath of trauma and social distress inflicted on families”.
The CLC also pushed back on child protection changes in the NT that were predicted to take many more children into care. The council argues for prevention and effective, early interventions to help struggling families stay together.
“In an essay published in The Australian newspaper’s Inquirer section, Professor Megan Davis asserts that ‘it is easier to blame the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle than to confront the realities of poverty, addiction, infrastructure and overcrowded housing, family violence and under-resourced support services’,” the CLC writes.
The parliamentary committee’s inquiry – into racism, hate and violence directed at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – is in part a response to a frightening incident in Perth on January 26, when police allege an item thrown into a crowd of Indigenous people and supporters was an unexploded bomb capable of “a mass casualty event”.
Almost every witness at public hearings has spoken about racism on social media platforms. Some said young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were most affected by the large volumes of derision and malice towards First Nations people.
Others have told the inquiry the racism on social media had ramped up since the defeat of the voice referendum in 2023.
At the Alice Springs hearing on Friday, one of Kumanjayi Little Baby’s grandfathers gave evidence about the poor state of remote communities. Robin Granites had previously given media interviews, including to The Australian, that town camps like Old Timers, where Kumanjayi Little Baby was last seen, were not safe for children.
He told the inquiry on Friday that he talked to Anthony Albanese when the Prime Minister visited the sorry camp for Kumanjayi Little Baby in Alice Springs after the five-day search for the little girl ended in the tragic discovery of her body on April 30.
Mr Granites said he invited Mr Albanese to visit his home community of Yuendumu to see how it is “unhealthy” and Mr Albanese told him he would like to come.
“We invited him to come out to the community … to see for himself – not other people to come from other places, to see for himself,” he said.
Mr Granites told the inquiry that Aboriginal people from remote communities came to Alice Springs because they were “bored”.
“They all come into town to play their poker machines,” Mr Granites told the inquiry.
“They don’t need to be worrying about Yuendumu and their kids, they worry about the town.
“It is too boring. That is the exact words you always find when you go out there.”
Mr Granites told the inquiry that he believed education was the answer to many of the problems facing remote communities. If children got a good education, remote communities would thrive, he said.
Other witnesses have told the inquiry that underfunding of remote communities was driving Aboriginal people into towns, even though there was not enough housing for them there either.
Paige TaylorIndigenous Affairs Correspondent, WA Bureau Chief