Aboriginal prison rates blew out under Triggs’s HRC while she was busy attacking Bill Leak

It’s been one whole year since a certain cartoon was published. Bill Leak responds to the furore in The Australian, August 5 last year:

I was trying to say that if you think things are pretty crook for the children locked up in the Northern Territory’s Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, you should have a look at the homes they came from. Then you might understand why so many of them finished up there.

But that wasn’t the end of it for Leak and his cartoon ... The Australian, October 15 last year:

Bill Leak and The Australian are staring down a Human Rights Commission challenge under section 18C, 10 weeks after the cartoonist’s provocative drawing led to a public debate over indigenous parental neglect.

So much has changed in a year. Ex-HRC boss Gillian Triggs is out of that job. The Australian, July 26:

Gillian Triggs, who this week ends her five-year term as president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, created unprecedented controversy around the commission. Her actions made her a hate figure ...

Unfortunately, she left of her own volition. The Australian, March 2:

Australian Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs will likely be recalled before the Senate to explain “misleading” evidence about the Bill Leak case ...

Bill Leak isn’t with us any more. The Australian, March 10:

The Australian’s editorial cartoonist Bill Leak has died in hospital of a suspected heart attack. He was 61.

The saddest thing of all? None of the things Bill Leak addressed in his cartoon have changed ... Leak’s appearance at the joint parliamentary inquiry into freedom of speech, February 12:

All my intention for that cartoon was to draw attention to the fact that one of the underlying reasons why 97 per cent of the children in the Don Dale detention centre are Aboriginal is that they come from shocking circumstances, the sort of circumstances that none of us would put up with, none of us could even endure.

But Gillian says she did a great job? Triggs on the ABC’s RN Breakfast, July 26:

I think that there are no regrets ...

Professor Triggs should have plenty of regrets when it comes to indigenous rights. The Australian, July 11:

The indigenous prison rate rose by 63 per cent between 1993, when the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody handed down its report, and 2016. The NSW rate grew by 25 per cent between 2013 and 2016 ... by the time they reach the age of 23, 24.5 per cent of the state’s indigenous population had already been remanded in custody, placed in a youth detention centre or given a prison sentence. This compared with just 1.3 per cent of the non-­indigenous population.

Imagine if she had focused on helping indigenous Australians instead of chasing cartoonists. Leak’s testimony to the parliamentary inquiry, February 12:

Colin Dillon is the father of a very close friend of mine, Anthony Dillon. Colin was Australia’s first Aboriginal policeman. He gave pivotal evidence at the Fitzgerald inquiry. He is one of the finest men you are ever likely to meet. He said, ‘Mate, that was such a great cartoon. What you have said in that cartoon is something that has to be said. But, I tell you what, there are a lot of people out there that just don’t want to know about it.’ Well, I discovered that he was right. By the time I went to bed that night, I was Australia’s leading racist.