The violent abuse of children in juvenile detention in the Northern Territory was the manifestation of a “culture ... of increased detention without trial” in the whole country, Australian Human Rights Commission president, Gillian Triggs has said.

Speaking on the ABC’s Q&A program after Four Corners aired shocking footage from a Darwin detention centre, Triggs endorsed calls for the matter to be independently investigated, with a view to charges being laid against those responsible. But she argued the the brutalisation of children was not an isolated incident.

Triggs said she felt “absolute horror” watching the footage, which showed six boys in the Don Dale juvenile detention centre in Darwin being tear-gassed, hooded, restrained, denied access to water and held in solitary confinement for more than a fortnight. The youngest of the boys was 14.

“If one of us were to have been found to have treated our children in this way we would probably be charged with a criminal offence and the children taken away from us. It’s an extremely distressing piece of footage to look at and I have visited many detention centres, sadly, but I have never seen conditions of that kind and I have never seen people treated in that way. I think it’s something that, as the experts were calling for, we clearly need some kind of investigation into this,” Triggs said.

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Triggs said a government-based independent commission was needed to establish the facts of the children’s abuse.



She said the abuse reflected “a culture that we’ve allowed to be created in Australia of increased detention without trial”, citing as an example Australia’s “unique” immigration policies which mandate, as a first resort, the indefinite detention of children and families who arrive in Australia by boat seeking asylum.

“We’ve created an environment in which governments feel free to exercise an administrative discretion to detain people for a number of different purposes. They may be good purposes, but the concern that we have at the Human Rights Commission is that when we detain people with cognitive disabilities for years on end without trial, when we detain children and their families ... we’ve created a culture of accepting this level of detention without trial and without proper judicial supervision. And, I’m sorry to say this, but I think there is that sense that the children are out of sight and out of mind in the Northern Territory in these detention centres and that’s an acceptable and necessary thing to do because some children go off the rails.



“We need to look deeply into our own psyche as a nation to say, ‘why have we not been prepared to be more humane?’ – to understand that we’re dealing with human beings. Some of them have committed serious offences, some have committed no offences and are seeking our protection.”

Fellow panellist Peter Kurti, a research fellow with the Centre for Independent Studies, said the abuses were “a disgrace”.

“It’s inconceivable that this is happening in Australia, and ... what must not happen is that this founders on the rocks of federal-state politics and somehow falls through the cracks.

“If the treatment we saw had been meted out overseas to Australian animals, there would have been national uproar. This simply cannot be allowed to pass, this is happening in our own country. I think it’s just disgraceful.”

Some of the boys assaulted in the Don Dale juvenile detention centre were Indigenous. Shireen Morris from the Cape York Institute said Australia had become “used to accepting low standards when it comes to Indigenous kids”.

“These kids are born with worse life chances than the rest of us and they end up in detention like that, getting treated as they do, and as one of the lawyers said in the program, it is consigning them to no future.”

The Q&A panel, which also included MPs Craig Laundy and Ed Husic, all supported an independent investigation.