Delivering its findings to parliament,Robert Tickner,the minister for Aboriginal affairs at that time,could not have been clearer. “The reports I have just tabled are historic documents,” he said. “They must command the attention not only of the governments and the parliaments of Australia but of the nation itself.”
Ultimately,Tickner said,“The report documents,in a way never before achieved,the impact of European settlement upon Australia’s Indigenous peoples,their dispossession and subordination within a dominant and often hostile society frequently motivated by self-interest,the development of racist attitudes both overt and hidden and the way in which these attitudes became institutionalised in the very practices of legal,educational,welfare and Aboriginal assistance authorities.”
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Its recommendations and findings,he said,provided “an agenda for the nation for the coming decade”. It was a clarion call.
Yet as that decade passed,and another,and another,Indigenous Australians continued to die in custody at an appallingly disproportionate rate. In greater numbers,in fact,in the years since the royal commission delivered its findings,with an average of 16.6 deaths a year since 1991 compared with 11 deaths a year between 1980 and 1989 – more than 525 in total. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology,Indigenous Australian men are almost 10 times more likely to die in prison than non-Indigenous men.
In 2021,16 Indigenous people died in custody in NSW alone,the highest yearly total for the state on record. In January,meanwhile,Victorian coroner Simon McGregor found that the 2020 death in custody of Veronica Nelson,a Gunditjmara,Dja Dja Wurrung,Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta woman,had not only been preventable but that her treatment by prison staff had been “cruel and degrading”.
Whistleblowers have subsequently come forward accusing companies running Australian prisons of medical neglect and indifference to the welfare of vulnerable people,particularly Indigenous inmates. They have told a joint investigation byThe Sydney Morning Herald,The Age and60 Minutes of prisoners dying by suicide despite family warnings,illegal handling of medicines and people being left to suffer in their cells with life-threatening illnesses.