Senior Larrakia Traditional Owner Dr Richard Fejo has taken a strong stand against the new Northern Territory government's plan to jail children as young as ten years old.

On Monday, Dr Fejo resigned as chairperson of the Darwin Waterfront Corporation in protest at the measure.

Dr Fejo told National Indigenous Times the CLP's 'tough on crime' strategy was "a political avenue of advancement" for their party.

"I worked for the Aboriginal legal services back in '94 to '98, so I worked with very hardened criminals… including isolation block, so life term prisoners, and I saw the conditions they were in.

"I also worked with some of the kids that were in the old Don Dale system… and I'm talking '94 to '98, so these kids have put up with a lot of crap for a long time.

"The new laws… they're blatantly racist. They are discriminatory, and they clearly point at First Nations people. There is no argument to that... Because I will say, if there's a Black child and a white child walking around the shopping centre, you know, the security is going to follow the Black child. If there's a Black or white child walking in the street, the police are going to be watching the Black child. You know, there is no true and I'm going to say it how it is."

Indigenous children are severely over-represented in the Territory's detention system.

Dr Fejo noted that systemic racism operates across many aspects of life in the NT.

"There is institutional racism that is obvious in the school systems. That's why our children are dropping out of high schools. There is not enough care given," he said.

"They're a minority group in an institution to turn them to mainstream, which is integration, and quite often, as in the case of my own children, they were bullied… They were outnumbered. They were picked on, they dropped out of school.

"Then what happens when they drop out of school? They go to methods of survival, and the methods of survival are the other kids are dropped out of school. And that's not always a good influence.

"We also have an issue up here where we have a lot of these kids that are walking the streets and breaking into the houses are not from Darwin. So, we have remote communities that are bringing in their families, and… the government's job, when they're actually bringing them to places like Darwin, their job should be to monitor them. They're not doing it well enough."

Dr Fejo warned all Indigenous children were being "painted with the same brush" if a small number acted in an antisocial way.

"So, the kids are jumping fences or whatever. They're not from this community, and then they're going around running amuck, but we're getting painted with that same brush," he said.

Dr Fejo noted that Aboriginal and non-Indigenous people will be judged differently even when engaged in the same or similar conduct.

"We see Aboriginal people that come to Darwin and sitting in the streets and getting drunk, and we also see Australians going to Bali and staggering around in the streets getting drunk. What's the difference? The difference is Aboriginal people can't afford to go to Bali," he said.

"White people in Darwin hate Aboriginal people because they see them in the streets getting unk… they treat them with racism. So, I asked the Australian people, what do you think the Balinese think of you - rude, drunk, abusive, racist people?"

Dr Fejo said the CLP's 'law and order' agenda targets Indigenous children.

"No 10-year-old child deserves to be in custody or locked up or arrested irrelevant of colour or creed or ethnicity, and this is what I've said from the start. They come back to that in the news and in the comments with 'this is not racist, because this applies to all children'. Bullshit," he said.

"If you look at the stats and the facts and you go down to Don Dale, you know it's full of Black kids already. When you go to the prison system, it's full of Black people. When you go to the hospital, it's full of Black people. When you go to Centrelink, it's full of Black people.

"People forgot that this land was Aboriginal land. And I always say, always was, always will be Aboriginal land. But they quickly forget to mention that all the resources that come from Australia were our resources. All of our economy was taken, was dispossessed… our land. We were never paid for that. We were never compensated for that. We should be kings and queens on our land. We should be the wealthiest and healthiest people, but we have a history that people don't want to talk about, and now I even see in Queensland that they're outlawing the truth telling inquiry. How ridiculous is that?"

Dr Fejo said mainstream settler society criminalises Aboriginal children and Aboriginal adults, and media institutions do not make enough of an effort to tackle racism – including racist commentary on their own social media pages.

"You look at posts on Facebook, (they) are not monitoring the racist responses that should not be up there. So, they're actually feeding the beast," he said.

"I'll give you this example… last week they reported there was a person on bail who had an ankle bracelet on, a monitor bracelet, who stole a car or something like that, and the picture was an ankle bracelet wrapped around a white person, and everyone replying was saying it's the wrong colour… and they're not monitoring it. They're feeding the beast. They're playing the role of stirring the pot."

The senior Larrakia man warned of the need to protect children from racism, including social media trolls.

"There's so much that we stand against in reality, in the world today, I've had a gut full of it, and my protest is to get everyone's attention and to say enough is enough," he said.

"My mum was Stolen Generation. She was removed when she was four years old and put on Croker Island, and she didn't reunite with her people until 40 years later.

"We know this history. We've already had this history. And the CLP government today is actually taking us back… 1930 that happened. That's how far back these policies were. And then I'd say, imagine yourself being a 10-year-old child at a shopping center, and you see a lolly, so you pick it up and you eat it, and a security guard grabs you and says, 'you're stealing now', you know what the reality is, a Black child will get dragged out of the shop today, now potentially grabbed by a police officer, handed over to police, put in a paddy wagon and take it to the police station and put in a cell. How traumatic is that for that child? It is discrimination, because you know what would happen to a white child? Nothing."

Dr Fejo warned of the long term consequences of criminalising youth.

"The reason why I actually quit this (the Darwin Waterfront role) is because it's brought back living examples of existing trauma across the First Nations community," he said.

"There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that it's discrimination because it targets a minority group. Secondly, my mother was Stolen Generation. When I heard about this, I'm thinking about what's going to happen when a 10 year-old kid is ripped off their parents, like my mother was, and put in a cell.

"I feel that impact personally, you know. We call it vicarious trauma, because it's not happening directly to me, but it's happening to my people, and we know this is going to happen to my people.

"The third point is this - the prisons are already full, and they're going to further overcrowd the prisons, which are already overcrowded.

"They're training more police. They're building more prisons. Their solution is to lock up the Black people and pretend that we never existed, which was how that happened in the 1930s. It's forcible removal of our children and forced integration into mainstream society. Ironically, the only thing that gives value to Aboriginal people today is our language and our culture. They like to see us dance and sing and play didgeridoo, but they're taking that away from us at the same time.

"It is cultural genocide. It is the same as the integration policies of Australia in 1901, to 'breed out the Black'. It's policies we already have in our history… and I don't think any voter who could see this future would have voted for that."

Dr Fejo said he would not give up his struggle against the plan to jail 10 year-old children.

"I am fighting to change those laws, or have them removed completely, because it breaches the rights of the child, and the government is ignoring that.

"I'm not alone on this. I'm not afraid. I quit my job so that I would be free of the chains of the NT government, because that job came under the NT government. So, it was a protest and demonstration. I quit that job so that I could be vocal, and I've been vocal… so that I can defend my mob."