Two weeks after the death of 24-year-old Warlpiri man Kumanjayi White in police custody, a familiar and painful pattern has re-emerged across Australia: grief, protest, and official silence.
Nearly 600 Indigenous people have died in custody since the 1991 Royal Commission, yet no one has ever been convicted.
Mr White's death — one of 12 First Nations deaths in custody this year alone — has sparked vigils and protests across the country, along with renewed calls for systemic change.
But for many Indigenous leaders and legal experts, Mr White's death is not an anomaly. It's a pattern — one enabled and enforced by government policy.
"Every time an Aboriginal person dies in custody, the Government says, 'never again'," says Dr John Paterson, chair of the Aboriginal Peak Organisations Northern Territory (APONT).
"But here we are again... This is a national shame, and it has to stop."
The list of punitive policies across the country continues to grow — despite all states and territories signing up to the Closing the Gap agreement.
In the past two years alone, the NT has lowered the age of criminal responsibility to 10; NSW and Victoria have enacted harsh bail laws that have been condemned by human rights groups; and Queensland's "adult crime, adult time" laws — targeting children — were introduced despite clear warnings they breach international human rights obligations.
The result is an overcrowding of prisons across Australia. First Nations people — particularly youth — are being detained at ever-higher rates, often on remand, without conviction, in direct contravention of the 1991 Royal Commission's key recommendations. The trauma for families, Elders and communities is deep and ongoing.
"Aboriginal children are being over-policed, over-surveilled, and funnelled into detention at alarming rates," according to Change the Record's chief executive Jade Lane.
Children, she says, are "being locked in cells, far from family, country, and culture — frightened and alone".
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Robert Tickner, chair of the Justice Reform Initiative and a former federal Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs in the Hawke and Keating Governments, told the ABC since the Royal Commission, every state and territory has played "law and order political games".
"Instead of being tough on crime, our politicians are being, I believe, incredibly dishonest with the public, because they know that they're implementing policies which will not make our communities safer," he said.
"The Royal Commission said, 'shift away from increasing our incarceration rates and instead significantly reduce them and invest in the alternatives that break the cycle of incarceration, that make our communities safer.' That's what our politicians should be saying and doing."
Instead, political leaders have seemingly doubled down on rhetoric or declined to implement wholesale reform. The Children's Human Rights Commissioner noted as much last year when she said politicians had told her: "There are no votes in children."
Asked this week whether the federal government would support an independent investigation into Mr White's death — a power it holds in the NT — Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declined.
"I need to be convinced that people in Canberra know better than people in the Northern Territory about how to deal with these issues, is my starting point," Mr Albanese said.
"The idea of federal intervention, which is, frankly, an easy thing that people come up with... without them saying where it leads."
For Independent Senator Lidia Thorpe — a vocal critic of both state and federal governments — the Prime Minister's words reflect a deeper issue.
"Instead of vague targets, the federal government could implement hard consequences when states and territories fail to make progress," Senator Thorpe said in a statement this week.
"The federal government could tie state and territory funding to compliance with national standards and international human rights obligations — including OPCAT, the Mandela Rules, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. But [Mr] Albanese refuses to take any responsibility."
That refusal to act has broader consequences. Experts have repeatedly said the failure to address over-policing, incarceration and systemic neglect directly results in preventable deaths. And in the NT, where Indigenous people make up nearly 90 per cent of the prison population, those stakes are higher than anywhere else in the country.
"Unless there is some commonwealth action, this will continue to be the case. It is not a question of if the commonwealth should act, but what it should do," leading Indigenous barrister Tony McAvoy SC told a Senate inquiry earlier this year.
Even longtime Labor ally Pat Turner AM, Lead Convenor of the Coalition of Peaks, has had enough.
"The time for polite inaction is over," she said this week.
"Our people are dying. The Northern Territory Government must act now – on police reform, on justice, and on the calls from our communities."
While the Prime Minister insists the government has moved on from the Voice to Parliament to "do things another way", Indigenous people across the country — some of the most over-policed people in the world — are still waiting to see what that looks like.
