ADJOURNMENT

Dr RYAN (Kooyong) (19:30): Every year this parliament marks Closing the Gap with solemn language about partnership, healing and progress. But, every year, the data tells a different story. The Productivity Commission's Closing the gap annual data compilation report July 2026is now out.

We're past the halfway point to 2031, the deadline for most targets under the national agreement. Of 19 targets, only one has been met. Three are on track, five are improving, but we won't get there on time, and on four targets we're going backwards.

On First Nations suicide, the trend is going backwards. On adult imprisonment—backwards. On the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children being removed from their families—backwards.

These targets speak most directly to whether a child grows up safe and connected to mob and is given a future. But on each of these targets, we're moving away from our goals, not towards them. In the Northern Territory, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania, the age of criminal responsibility is 10.

In Victoria it's 12, but there's no certainty that an incoming Liberal-One Nation state government wouldn't walk that back. Only the ACT has raised the age to 14 years. In most Australian jurisdictions we still let 10-year-olds be arrested, charged and locked up.

This government has not yet moved to raise the age of criminal responsibility despite overwhelming medical evidence on child brain development, the Standing Council of Attorneys-General's own working group and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child all recommending that it be increased to age 14. Every year that we fail to raise the age nationally, we choose prison cells over primary schools for children that we couldn't legally leave at home by themselves.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are dramatically overrepresented in the cohort imprisoned in early childhood. Target 13 of Closing the Gap demands that we halve family violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children by 2031. We are nowhere near that.

Indigenous women are hospitalised after family violence at more than 30 times the rate of non-Indigenous women, and, tragically, they're 10 times more likely to die as a result of assault. Aboriginal community controlled organisations have been telling the government for years what works: community led, properly and securely funded, culturally safe services. But remote and very remote communities, where the crisis is worst, are still those which are least resourced to respond to it.

Last week in Mildura, two 12-year-old Aboriginal boys on a bike were allegedly chased through a pedestrian mall and struck by a ute. A man has been charged, and the matter is now before the courts. The fact of that—two kids on a bike mowed down deliberately at 80 kilometres an hour by a white man in a ute, and the fear and anger that that has provoked in Aboriginal communities across the country—is a tragic reflection of how we have failed and how we continue to fail to close the gap.

When child development outcomes are worsening, when hospitalisation rates for violence remain many multiples higher than for non-Indigenous Australians and when children as young as 10 can be jailed but 12-year-olds can be run down in a mall and the nation hardly reacts, it's the same crisis but in different datasets and in different headlines. We are not winning on our Closing the Gap commitments.

On the measures that matter most for children's safety, whether they're locked up, whether they're taken into care, whether they're hospitalised because of family violence or whether they're lost to suicide, we're going backwards. This government has the power to raise the age of criminal responsibility nationally. It has the power to fund First Nations led family violence services properly for the long term.

It has the power to do what NATSILS and more than 200 peak bodies asked the Prime Minister to do today—call an emergency summit on youth justice. This government has the power to be honest about the gap between our rhetoric and our record. While we fail to do that, we fail Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.