Opinion: Bill Leak’s controversial cartoon still sadly relevant today

People are quick to declare Black Lives Matter, but how many Indigenous parents think their children matter, asks Mike O’Connor. VOTE IN OUR POLL

Amid the avalanche of ­statistics that now engulf us daily, and to which the State Government is so ­wedded, there is one that has gone unheralded.

While decisions on borders – which should be based on conviction and intellect yet are driven by a reliance on numbers – the one figure that has been ignored is one that tells a story of collective failure – over 70 per cent of children held in police watch-house custody are ­Indigenous.

It was revealed by Police Minister Mark Ryan in response to a parliamentary Question on Notice, figures provided by the Queensland Police Service showing that of the 3689 youths aged 10-17 years who spent between an hour to more than a week in the watch-house, 2635 or 71.42 per cent were Indigenous.

The figure for children aged under 13 is even more damning, with 80 per cent of those who spent up to six hours in a watch-house lockup being Indigenous.

The figure for adults tells a similar story with 29 per cent of the national adult prison population identifying as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders, a grouping which comprises slightly less than 4 per cent of Australia’s population, with Indigenous 17-year-olds five times as likely to spend more than a week in watch-house custody than non-Indigenous youths.

When these uncomfortable statistics are highlighted, then cries of racism are not slow to be raised.

Police are accused of targeting Indigenous youths, suggesting that there is an unwritten policy within the police service to go after Indigenous offenders and ignore non-Indigenous wrongdoers.

Police Minister Mark Ryan in Question Time yesterday. Picture: Dan Peled/NCA NewsWire

It’s an offensive and uncorroborated slur on the service, the members of which I am certain would prefer that there were no children or youths of any racial grouping in custody.

Griffith School of Law professor Elena Marchetti describes the figures as representing “an intergenerational trauma that we continue to inflict on Indigenous kids”.

“The message we’re always giving when we place them in custody is that they’re bad, there’s something wrong with them and they need to be removed,” she said.

The question, surely, is why are they showing so little respect for the laws which govern our community in the first place?

Parents instil in us a basic understanding of the difference between right and wrong and the education system reinforces this.

What happens if you lack any parental guidance or positive adult role models and your attendance at school is haphazard?

The answer is to be seen in the statistics.

The inconvenient conclusion to be drawn is many Indigenous parents routinely abandon their responsibilities and do little to instil in their children respect for our laws and the property of others.

People are quick to take to the streets and declare Black Lives Matter while happily ignoring the cold, hard, irrefutable figures that show far too many Indigenous parents do not think the futures of their children matter.

In January, there will be the usual demands to declare Australia Day “Invasion Day” and more victimhood street marches.

Added to these cries will be those for a separate Indigenous-only body advising Parliament, creating two classes of Australians.

They have a democratically guaranteed right to do these things, but while they march up and down the street waving flags, their children are stealing cars, robbing houses and being hauled off to the watch-house.

Some of the more sensible Indigenous minds to enter the debate have said that until their people cast aside the victim’s mantle and begin taking responsibility for their own actions or lack of them, little will change.

They have been lambasted for their courage and cast as traitors.

The late Bill Leak, the Australian newspaper’s gifted cartoonist, was pilloried for drawing a cartoon showing a police officer holding an Indigenous youth and saying to his father: ”You’ll have to sit down and talk to your son about personal responsibility.”

“Yeah. Righto,” replies the father. “What’s his name then?”

Leak was branded a racist for telling it the way it was, saying in his defence that when talking about the plight of incarcerated Indigenous children “you should have a look at the homes they came from. Then you might understand why so many of them finished up there.”

It’s a little over five years since the cartoon was published and nothing has changed.

These kids deserve better. They deserve a chance to have a future.

There’s only one group of people who can give them this chance, and they know who they are.