SNAICC CEO Catherine Liddle warns of ‘racism’ towards Indigenous children

The CEO of the peak body for Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander children ‘struggles to sleep at night’, saying she believes young people are not safe in Alice Springs.

Catherine Liddle was emotional as she read from a list of widely circulated social media comments directed towards Indigenous children in her hometown of Alice Springs.

“Let me read you some of the social media comments that our children have to read,” she said.

“People like me have to see them, people like my children read them.”

Ms Liddle said the comments included:

“Set bear traps next time and a bull bar will fix that”; “I will be leaving some alcohol on my front porch but with added extras”; and “Put a bounty on their head and turn them into wet suits.”

As the chief executive officer of SNAICC, the peak body representing Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander children, Ms Liddle is firm with her next words.

“These are children. This is sickening. This is what we need to be looking at. This is what we should be calling out,” she said.

SNAICC CEO Catherine Liddle spoke of her personal experience of the Intervention, and her fears that language being used around children in Alice Springs now is “exactly the same” as the Intervention era. Picture: NTCOSS

Speaking at the Northern Territory Council of Social Services (NTCOSS) conference in Alice Springs, Ms Liddle spoke out against “disturbing” and “confronting” racism towards children in the town.

“Our children are not safe in Alice Springs,” she said.

“We have to look at it in the eye and we have to name it, our children are suffering from gross racism.

“And I’m not just talking about our children on the streets, or the children involved in crimes. I’m talking about all of our children. Those young people are definitely not safe.

“It is 2023 and again, Aboriginal families are demons incapable of looking after their children. No recognition of the lack of housing or investment in housing, no recognition in the lack of investment into healing and therapeutic services that our faculty so desperately need.”

Ms Liddle said she struggled to sleep at night as language around Indigenous children morphed into the language used around the time when the Intervention began.

“That (the Intervention) hurt. It really hurt. Many of our men stopped playing with our children, big brothers stopped playing with little brothers, our services were stripped out of remote communities, there was no choice but to come into town,” she said.

“The Intervention came off the back of the Little Children Are Sacred report in the Northern Territory. The findings of that report were weaponised, not acted on, weaponised.

“The same language, exactly the same language, exactly the same playbook is what we see today, and that is why we can’t just sit here and be silent about what we are seeing.”

“I got those letters demanding that my four children be presented for examination. We can’t stand by and let this happen to families again.”

Catherine Liddle said years of failed policy was a key factor behind a spike in youth crime in Alice Springs over the summer, stating “we knew this would happen”.

Ms Liddle called out a lack of preparation ahead of a horror summer in Alice Springs, which saw national media attention circle in on a “youth crime crisis”.

“Every single summer we see a spike in crime,” she said.

“Where was the service sector ready for this? Why did we not have things in place?

“Why were the basketball courts not open? Why did we not have extra therapeutic care in place?

“Why did we not have safe spaces for children to sleep at night?

“We knew that this would happen, and yet we weren’t ready. Again, the combination of many, many years of failed policy.”

She said she was not excusing unacceptable behaviour or pretending youth crime was not an issue in town, but said as SNAICC spoke to children on the ground many of them had grown up seeing their parents rejected from ”everywhere in Mparntwe”.

“It (this behaviour) hides an uncomfortable fact that our families aren’t welcome,” Ms Liddle said.

“We have to have an honest discussion about racism, and how the politics of racism is driving a lot of this debate.

“This is not denying there isn’t a level of dysfunction that needs to be responded to, but racism plays a significant role in that dysfunction.”

Originally published as SNAICC CEO Catherine Liddle warns of ‘racism’ towards Indigenous children