The Things You’re Not Allowed to Say About Aboriginal Australia

Australia has developed a national religion of selective blindness around Aboriginal disadvantage. There are approved facts, approved explanations and approved villains, and if a statistic points somewhere inconvenient, an entire industry seems ready to smother the bastard under enough “context” that nobody can see it anymore.

Colonisation was destructive. Dispossession happened. Racism happened. Australia has spent decades discussing those facts, apologising for them, legislating around them and building policy around them. Yet somehow they are still expected to function as an all-purpose explanation for whatever happens today. Crime? Colonisation. Alcohol abuse? Colonisation. Children not attending school? Colonisation. Domestic violence? Colonisation. Welfare dependency? Colonisation. Youth crime? Colonisation. At some point perhaps we could examine what people are actually fucking doing in 2026.

Because the data does not give a single fuck about anybody’s preferred narrative.

The Prison Numbers No One Wants to Explain

Let’s start with prison. In the March quarter of 2026, Australia had an average daily count of 18,272 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners. They accounted for 37% of everybody in custody, and the imprisonment rate was 2,701 per 100,000 Indigenous adults. The annual 2025 prisoner data also showed that 76% of Indigenous prisoners had experienced previous adult imprisonment.

Thirty-seven percent of the prison population. Three out of four having been inside before. You can write another report about policing, sentencing, historical trauma and socioeconomic disadvantage, and I’m sure somebody will happily invoice the government for formatting it. None of that makes the offending disappear. At some point the interesting question stops being exclusively why are they being imprisoned? and becomes why the fuck do so many keep committing offences that bring them back into the criminal justice system?

Calling every uncomfortable criminal statistic “over-policing” is particularly convenient because it places responsibility exactly where the approved narrative wants it: somewhere else. Police can be criticised when police behave badly. Courts can be criticised when courts behave badly. And people who repeatedly assault, rob, steal or destroy other people’s property can also be criticised for behaving like fucking criminals. These concepts are capable of existing simultaneously without the universe collapsing.

When the Booze Restrictions Disappeared

Central Australia supplied a useful real-world experiment in pretending alcohol wasn’t one of the problems. After restrictions affecting remote communities and Alice Springs town camps ceased in 2022, official Northern Territory material recorded a 79.4% increase in alcohol-related assaults in Alice Springs in the year ending November 2022 compared with the year ending November 2019, together with a 96.7% increase in alcohol-involved domestic-violence assaults. Property offending hit record levels, and alcohol-related emergency-department presentations increased after July 2022.

The political conversation somehow managed to spend enormous energy asking whether alcohol restrictions were racist while Alice Springs was demonstrating why the fucking restrictions existed. Eventually restrictions came back. Apparently allowing unrestricted alcohol access in communities already suffering catastrophic alcohol-related harm did not produce a spontaneous outbreak of responsible Chardonnay tasting.

And here’s the part that makes the simplistic racism narrative particularly stupid: Aboriginal leaders themselves have repeatedly pushed for tougher alcohol controls when they have seen what booze is doing in their communities. The problem isn’t that Aboriginal people are incapable of recognising alcohol abuse. The problem is that outsiders can become so obsessed with performing sensitivity that they are occasionally less willing to say stop fucking drinking than the people actually living with the consequences.

Beating Your Own People

Family violence is where the euphemism machine should simply be switched off. In 2023–24 there were around 4,400 family-violence hospitalisations involving First Nations people. Nearly 72% of Indigenous assault hospitalisations were related to family violence, and the age-standardised family-violence hospitalisation rate was 485 per 100,000, compared with 19 per 100,000 for non-Indigenous Australians. That’s 26 times higher.

For Indigenous women the age-standardised rate was 750 per 100,000, around 27 times the non-Indigenous female rate. In remote and very remote areas, the rate for Indigenous women reached roughly 2,500 per 100,000. Head or neck injuries accounted for 70% of hospitalisations of Indigenous women aged 15 and over where an assault by a family member caused the injury, including hundreds involving brain injury.

We can have another national symposium about terminology if everybody desperately needs catering and name badges, but somebody is doing the fucking beating. These women aren’t arriving at hospitals because a colonial statue looked at them aggressively. They’re being assaulted by partners and relatives. History can help explain how social breakdown develops, but an explanation does not grab somebody by the throat, punch them in the head or hit them with a blunt object. A person does that.

There is something deeply perverse about becoming so terrified of stereotyping that the actual victims disappear behind the sensitivity. If Aboriginal women are being hospitalised at these rates, protecting the feelings of violent men should rank somewhere below protecting the women they’re fucking assaulting.

Poisoning the Next Generation

Then there is fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. A population-based study of seven- and eight-year-old children in Western Australia’s Fitzroy Valley found FASD in approximately 19% of the children examined, one of the highest rates documented anywhere in the world. NHMRC material also reports that, among women in the Fitzroy Valley study who drank during pregnancy, most drank at risky or high-risk levels.

Nineteen percent. Nearly one child in five carrying permanent neurological damage associated with alcohol exposure before birth. That’s not a cultural misunderstanding, and it’s not something that can be cured by changing vocabulary every five years so everybody feels more enlightened.

The especially inconvenient detail is that this research happened because Aboriginal leaders in the Fitzroy Valley recognised that alcohol was wrecking children and wanted the problem investigated. They didn’t need some white activist in Melbourne explaining that mentioning maternal drinking might be insensitive. They could see the fucking damage.

There are problems where historical context genuinely helps construct a solution. FASD has a considerably simpler first step: don’t drink while pregnant. No parliamentary apology can reverse prenatal brain damage after the fact, and no amount of sociological poetry can make ethanol nutritious.

Kids Who Don’t Go to School

Australia also spends enormous amounts of money trying to improve Indigenous educational outcomes while confronting the revolutionary discovery that children generally learn more when they are actually inside the fucking school.

ACARA’s 2025 data put the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander attendance rate at 77.2%, compared with an overall Australian rate of 88.8%. But the nastier number is attendance level, meaning students attending at least 90% of school days. Only 36.8% of Indigenous students reached that threshold.

So fewer than four in ten Indigenous students were attending at least 90% of the time. Governments can unveil another Closing the Gap strategy, produce another glossy PDF, redesign another logo and organise another panel discussion featuring twelve people agreeing with one another. None of it teaches a child who isn’t fucking there.

The employment numbers later in life make the relationship rather difficult to miss. Among First Nations people, employment was 93.5% for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher and only 25.3% for those whose highest schooling was Year 9 or below. Education does not magically solve every social problem, but apparently turning up long enough to get one provides a rather spectacular advantage.

The Report They Prefer to Forget

In 2007, the Northern Territory’s Little Children Are Sacred inquiry investigated sexual abuse of Aboriginal children. After extensive research and community consultation, it concluded that child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities was serious, widespread and often unreported, and called for major reform.

The Howard government’s Northern Territory Intervention then became hugely controversial, and eventually the controversy surrounding the response became easier to discuss than the revolting fucking problem that triggered it. Arguments about government overreach, consultation and racial discrimination are legitimate political arguments. They do not un-abuse a single child.

There was endless discussion about whether organised paedophile rings existed. Fine. Apparently unless child abuse comes with a board of directors, organisational chart and registered head office, somebody thinks the absence of a sophisticated criminal syndicate makes the underlying abuse less important. It doesn’t. Children were being sexually abused, adults knew it was happening, much of it wasn’t reported, and the inquiry said so.

Children Running Wild

Youth detention statistics are another piece of data that refuses to behave politely. On an average night in the June quarter of 2025, 60% of Australians aged 10–17 in detention were First Nations young people, even though First Nations children represented about 6.6% of that age group nationally. They were 21 times as likely as non-Indigenous young people to be in detention.

That is an astonishing disparity. And yet parts of the conversation still manage to behave as if noticing actual offending somehow demonstrates insufficient sophistication. In towns suffering repeated car thefts, break-ins and assaults, ordinary people don’t experience crime as an academic exercise in structural disadvantage. They experience it when their fucking car disappears.

Children reaching detention at ten, eleven, twelve or thirteen is catastrophic. Governments have responsibilities, schools have responsibilities, child-protection agencies have responsibilities, but eventually parents and families have responsibilities too. Apparently expecting parents to stop their thirteen-year-old nicking cars at three in the fucking morning is now some revolutionary right-wing concept. Fair enough. Maybe next year Canberra can commission a $14 million report to discover that parents are supposed to know where their kids are.

If your thirteen-year-old is repeatedly joyriding in stolen vehicles at 3 a.m., the problem is not primarily that society has failed to appreciate his cultural journey. The immediate problem is that your thirteen-year-old is repeatedly joyriding in fucking stolen vehicles at 3 a.m.

Where the Money Actually Goes

Then there’s money. Aboriginal organisations, land councils and government programs handle enormous amounts of public or community money, and some organisations do useful work with it. Others have provided corruption investigators with rather more entertaining reading.

The NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption found that four people, including two public officials, engaged in corrupt conduct involving a scheme around land owned by the Awabakal Local Aboriginal Land Council. Three people obtained more than $1 million in benefits from the scheme.

That wasn’t an insensitive stereotype. That was an anti-corruption finding.

The Australian National Audit Office has separately reported governance and conflict-of-interest deficiencies in Indigenous organisations managing substantial public resources, including deficiencies in grants assessment arrangements. Aboriginal Investment NT alone was established with an initial allocation of $680 million over three years from the Aboriginals Benefit Account.

When organisations complain about insufficient funding, asking what happens to the funding already provided is not racism. It’s accounting. If public money intended to improve desperately disadvantaged communities disappears into corruption, nepotism, incompetence or shit governance, the victims are Aboriginal people who were supposed to benefit from the fucking money.

Welfare Is Supposed to Be a Safety Net

Now for the statistic that will make certain people suddenly become very interested in explaining denominators.

On 28 March 2025, 341,270 First Nations Australians were receiving an income-support payment, equivalent to 48.7% of the First Nations population aged 16 and over. JobSeeker alone accounted for 115,655 recipients, Disability Support Pension another 69,505, and Parenting Payment Single 57,100.

Nearly half.

Obviously a disability pension is not the same thing as refusing employment, and an age pensioner isn’t expected to grab a shovel tomorrow morning. But JobSeeker alone having more than 115,000 First Nations recipients is not an invented stereotype. Nor is the wider dependence on government payments something that becomes imaginary because discussing it makes somebody uncomfortable.

Employment data tell the same story from another direction. In 2022–23, 57% of First Nations people aged 15–64 were employed, 9.5% were unemployed and 34% were outside the labour force. In very remote areas employment dropped to 38.1%, while 49.1% were outside the labour force.

A welfare state exists to support people who genuinely need support. It becomes something uglier when dependency becomes normal, expected and eventually inherited as just another way of life. Treating welfare as a lifestyle should not become acceptable merely because calling it out produces an uncomfortable conversation.

And the education numbers make the eternal helplessness narrative look even sillier. First Nations people with bachelor’s degrees had a 93.5% employment rate, actually higher in that dataset than the corresponding non-Indigenous rate of 87.9%. People with Year 9 or below were employed at only 25.3%.

So apparently education, qualifications and personal choices still matter after all. Who knew? Captain Cook isn’t secretly filling out every Centrelink form from beyond the grave.

The STI Numbers They Soft-Pedal

Sexually transmitted infections provide another group of statistics that stubbornly refuse to become socially convenient. The Kirby Institute’s 2025 surveillance report found that in 2024 the infectious syphilis notification rate among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was more than five times the non-Indigenous rate, while the gonorrhoea rate was almost four times as high. Chlamydia notifications also remained substantially elevated.

Again, these aren’t numbers produced by somebody’s drunk racist uncle on Facebook. They’re national health-surveillance data. If disease prevalence is dramatically different between populations, public health needs to ask why, identify the behaviours and conditions driving transmission and then deal with them.

“Context” should be something used to understand a problem. It should not be sprayed over a statistic until the statistic disappears beneath six inches of bureaucratic foam.

The Children Keep Paying the Bill

Child-protection numbers pull several of these failures together. In 2023–24, 57,789 First Nations children had contact with the child-protection system, and 12,965 were subjects of substantiated maltreatment. The rate of substantiated maltreatment was 33 per 1,000 Indigenous children, around six times the non-Indigenous rate.

By 30 June 2024, 19,987 First Nations children were in out-of-home care, at a rate roughly 11 times that of non-Indigenous children. Of those Indigenous children in out-of-home care, 45% had already been continuously in care for five years or more.

Those aren’t abstract products of colonial history walking around on little historical legs. They’re actual children alive today, living through neglect, violence, instability and family breakdown today. They have considerably more at stake than the adults who become offended when somebody describes what is fucking happening to them.

There is a grotesque irony in claiming to defend Aboriginal people while treating criticism of destructive behaviour inside Aboriginal families or communities as somehow more offensive than the destructive behaviour itself. A child being beaten, neglected or sexually abused doesn’t need everybody to use nicer terminology. The child needs adults to stop the fucking abuse.

History Is Not a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

Colonisation did not happen last Tuesday. Dispossession was real, government policies did enormous damage, and the abrupt introduction of industrial quantities of alcohol into Aboriginal societies had catastrophic consequences. Those facts belong in any serious explanation of how Australia arrived here.

They do not suspend cause and effect in 2026. They do not make assault acceptable, prenatal alcohol exposure harmless, school attendance optional, stolen cars communal property, corruption culturally sensitive or treating welfare as a lifestyle a civil right.

There is something profoundly patronising about constantly lowering expectations while calling it compassion. Sending children to school, not beating your partner, not abusing children, not getting drunk while pregnant, not stealing other people’s shit and taking responsibility for your own actions are not uniquely white cultural standards. They’re fairly basic requirements for a functioning society.

If equality means anything, it should include equality of expectation. Treating Aboriginal adults as permanently exempt from ordinary responsibility because their ancestors were mistreated isn’t respect. It’s a bizarre form of soft bigotry dressed up in expensive consultancy language.

The Narrative Has Approved Villains

The media and institutional class know these figures because most of them come from Australian government agencies and institutions. ABS publishes them. AIHW publishes them. ACARA publishes them. Health researchers publish them. Anti-corruption bodies publish them. The numbers aren’t hiding in a locked basement.

What happens instead is fragmentation. Prison overrepresentation gets one story, alcohol another, family violence another, school absence another, welfare another, youth crime another and child protection another. Each receives enough context to ensure that responsibility eventually floats gently away from whoever actually did anything.

The preferred villains are external: government, police, colonialism, racism, poverty, white Australia and “the system.” Sometimes those really are part of the problem. But internal patterns of violence, alcohol abuse, chronic school absence, youth offending, welfare dependency, neglect and corrupt administration also exist, and pretending they are merely shadows cast by somebody else’s behaviour turns Aboriginal people into spectators in their own fucking lives.

Nobody chose anything. Nobody did anything. Nobody is responsible for anything. The system apparently materialised with a baseball bat, colonialism poured the vodka, racism stole the Toyota and Captain Cook completed the Centrelink application.

That would be funny if the consequences weren’t sitting in prisons, emergency departments, youth detention centres, child-protection systems and classrooms full of empty chairs.

Ordinary Australians notice because reality is exceptionally rude. It keeps happening without asking permission from editors, activists, politicians or consultants first. They see the violence, the stolen cars, the drunk people, the absent children and the crime statistics, and then they’re told the correct conversation is mostly about something somebody else did generations ago.

No amount of land acknowledgements, carefully sanitised reports, renamed government programs or professionally offended commentary can make measurable patterns cease to exist.

Reality continues to leak around the edges of the sermon. It sucks.