Reading my newspapers on Wednesday, I was horrified to see a report about a young Aboriginal girl from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands who had hanged herself. She was only nine years old.
I was first shocked – then deeply, deeply saddened. As a parent, I can only imagine what this loss has meant to her family and community and, like many Australians, I am struggling to comprehend that a child so young would do such a thing - in our nation.
It is the tender age of the girl that makes this story especially shocking but we have long been aware of horrifying statistics about Aboriginal suicide in Australia.
I think we have become tragically desensitised to these statistics, reaching us as they do, almost every day, through newspaper reports, the airwaves and our TVs. Our seeming inability to respond effectively, as a nation, to put a stop to this scourge, despite numerous commissions and inquiries and reports, is also horrifying.
Suicide is a tragic thing wherever it occurs. But we can’t ignore the fact that the proportion of Aboriginal people taking their lives is around three times higher than the non-Aboriginal population in Australia. And with evidence that suicide is possibly significantly underreported in those communities, the real number might be a lot higher.
Young indigenous people are particularly at risk. The Indigenous youth suicide rate in the Northern Territory is 30 per 100,000 - 30 times higher than youth suicide rates in New South Wales (indigenous and non-indigenous) of one in 100,000.
In mid-January, South Australian Aboriginal leader Tauto Sansbury wrote a heartbreaking piece on online opinion website The Punch. He had been to eight funerals in the first 13 days of the year. Among those were three suicides. All deaths were premature, preventable.
I have met Tauto myself and he is a caring man deeply devoted to his community. He knows intimately the problems that affect Aboriginal communities, including in many instances, the hopelessness and lack of vision of a better future that leads to an act of suicide.
It is disadvantage, social exclusion, unresolved grief and loss, trauma and abuse, cultural dislocation, racism and discrimination which contribute to a vulnerability to suicide in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. To make a difference we must determinedly tackle all of these.
This was recognised by the 2010 Senate Report, The Hidden Toll: Suicide in Australia, which made many recommendations, including the development of a National Indigenous Suicide Prevention Strategy to target the particular vulnerabilities and needs of Aboriginal communities.
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Suicide Prevention Advisory Group is currently working on the strategy and expected to publish its work in October.
For my part, I see the disproportionate Aboriginal imprisonment rate – especially of young people – as both a symptom and cause of the despair that can lead to members of the community taking their own lives.
Imprisonment is a waste and in many cases it doesn’t make communities safer. With young Indigenous people it represents a squandering of the hope and potential that resides in the next generation. Redirecting funds and strategies away from imprisonment to community programs to prevent crime and reduce recidivism (known as Justice Reinvestment) is a core Greens policy and one on which I will continue to work.
The Hidden Toll report acknowledged a start has been made by the government to address suicide in Australia, but it also shows that a lot more must be done – and it needs to be done quickly.
The death of this little girl shows that we are racing against the clock to turn around these terrible statistics and start to rectify the root causes of disadvantage and trauma in Aboriginal communities.
Australians do care. The success of any strategy will ultimately depend on the way in which it is embraced and implemented by government - and all of us. As a community we can and must share responsibility for doing what is needed to tackle this sad situation.
