ADJOURNMENT

Senator LIDDLE (South Australia—Deputy Opposition Whip in the Senate) (19:39): I rise to speak about that devastating story that's coming out of Western Australia. We've all been watching it over nearly seven weeks now. It's the story of a grandmother, Dorothy Papertalk, whose children were killed by their mother back in 2022.

Imagine that for a moment. Imagine how devastating that is. But this story is not just about Dorothy Papertalk and her grandchildren.

This story is all about a failure of governments to understand the urgency to respond. The most powerful people in this country, who have the privilege of political power to do the right thing—how disgusting it has been to read the newspaper and see the Cook government is not prepared to find a way to get an inquest to identify what failed and who failed to prevent the tragic deaths of those children.

Those children had their whole lives in front of them. They should never have spent another day with their mother, when their grandmother was asking, begging, pleading, making formal requests to people to have someone help her. That's what we need to be looking into.

We know how they died. I won't go into explaining that again because it is disgusting, tragic. But it was also preventable.

I say that in here because the people with the power to intervene—with the legislation and the systems to intervene—clearly failed this family. And this is not the only family. There are some 50,000 children in this country in the so-called child protection system.

This government in here, the federal government, has put a lot of money behind the national plan to address domestic, family and sexual violence. In fact, there's a separate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander plan—that we waited three years for—to identify how to address the significant, disproportionate number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people coming into contact with the child protection system.

Jamelia, 10, Arnda, seven, and Kelvin, four months, never really had a chance because the system and someone did not respond to give them that chance. Do you know what was even worse? People look at this as a technical issue.

They find a technical issue not to respond to what is painfully obvious. If I walked into any supermarket, any cafe, any pub, people would say, 'This is just not right; we have to find a way.' The Prime Minister, when he was overseas on one of his trips, turned it into a technical issue: 'It's a state matter.' Well, I call bollocks. This is one country, one people, and those children deserved protection.

When their mother could not care for them, the state should have intervened. No hiding behind a principle that's created to keep Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with their families—somebody should have intervened. Why am I passionate about this?

It shouldn't take someone like me who's actually lost a family member—murdered by someone—when the system could have and should have helped by intervening. It doesn't take that. It shouldn't take that.

It must not take that. It is the responsibility of every one of us—every one of us in the services on the front line and every one of us in the state government, territory government, federal government. This is not somebody else's responsibility.

Actually giving an inquest so we can prevent more harm and prevent more deaths—young people being the best they can be and living their best lives is our responsibility. It is no-one else's. (Time expired) Senate adjourned at 19:44