The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre has called for the immediate closure of northern Tasmania's Ashley Youth Detention Centre.
It comes after the Tasmanian government earlier this week confirmed the troubled Centre's closure had been delayed for the third time while a new youth justice facility is built in the state's south.
Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre campaign manager, Nala Mansell, said the government's decision to further delay the closing of Ashley "condemns vulnerable children to even more years of state-sanctioned violence and abuse".
"Instead of closing the child torture chambers Minister Jaensch is now fast-tracking plans to relocate and rebrand the very same broken system that has already devastated so many lives," Ms Mansell said, Green Left reports.
"You don't fix abuse by renaming it. Every extra day that Ashley stays open is another day this government is complicit in trauma."
On Monday, Tasmanian Minister for Children, Roger Jaensch confirmed the Centre would remain open until early 2028.
"We cannot (close the centre) before we have a new functional detention facility," Minister Jaensch told reporters, via AAP.
"We believe … we can see the new facility built before the end of 2027 and then the closure of Ashley shortly thereafter."
The Tasmanian government says the Centre will be replaced by a 16-bed "best-practice, therapeutic design," in Pontville, north of Hobart.
Ashley was a focus of the state's Commission of Inquiry into Government Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Institutional Settings in 2022, with the centre plagued by allegations of abuse.
Ms Mansell said "Aboriginal children, already the most overrepresented in prisons and the most vulnerable to harm, continue to bear the brunt of this failure".
"These children are not criminals. They are victims of a society that criminalises poverty, dispossession and trauma," she said, Green Left reports.
"What they need is connection to culture, to land, to healing. They need support and safety, not punishment."
Last month Indigenous advisor to Amnesty International Australia, Rodney Dillon, told National Indigenous Times the most important priority must be "stopping kids from staying in that [justice] system" and that "…locking them up is not the answer".
"So we've got to develop things that [are] going to stop kids from staying in this system, and help them get away from this, address the issues that the kids got to get into it, and then see how we go from there," Mr Dillon said.
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) data suggests on an average day in 2022-23 in Tasmania, "First Nations young people aged 10–17 were about four times as likely as non-Indigenous young people to be under supervision".
Data suggests First Nations young people aged 10-17 represented 31 per cent of young people under youth justice supervision in Tasmania during that time period, despite Aboriginal youth in Tasmanian making up 10 per cent of that age demographic in the general population.
Ms Mansell said the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre is demanding the "immediate and permanent closure of Ashley Youth Detention Centre," instead calling for investment in culturally safe, community-led solutions.
"The government cannot be allowed to keep torturing children in new buildings with the same brutal system," she said.
