It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to immediately condemn the violence in Alice Springs on Thursday night. The first question he received at his Friday press conference was on the topic – and the standard political response, for a decade or more, has been to condemn such actions, to condemn all violence, then move on to whatever else the politician feels it necessary to say.
Instead, Albanese began by saying, “It breaks your heart.” He was clearly talking about the killing of the five-year-old girl now known as Kumanjayi Little Baby. Next: “This is a community that are hurting.” Then he repeated something his minister for Indigenous Australians had said to him, the reminder that “literally hundreds and hundreds of people came together to search for this young girl”. He indicated a desire for an end to the disturbances. But rather than a stern reprimand, this wish was expressed in sympathetic terms: “We want to see the community come together, but we certainly understand people’s anger and frustration.”
What is not said is often as important as what is said. The little girl’s mother issued a statement, writing of herself and her son: “It is going to be so hard to live the rest of our lives without you.” In her plain concision, she evoked the drawn-out, daily grind of grief – and the wonderful girl she had lost.
Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist Amy McQuire wrote for Black Witness that the tragedy and its aftermath demonstrated the love of Indigenous people for this child and for all their children. The way in which that love was shown might not always be understood by other Australians “who don’t have to fight to have their children seen as grievable”. It was “shown through the searches, through her family who spoke out in the media, and yes, through the community’s anger: an outright, most visible expression of their grief”. Her short article was headlined, “The disappearance of our children should always stop the nation.”
Which itself did not quite state, but powerfully implied, a crucial thing: that often enough the deaths and disappearances of Indigenous children barely register on the national imagination. Katie Kiss, an official at the Human Rights Commission, said she could not recall “a time when the disappearance of an Aboriginal child has received this level of urgent attention from law enforcement”.
Then there are the more than 30 Indigenous children who have died in interactions with police and prisons – that’s since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the final report of which was delivered in 1991. Many more adults: last week, a report confirmed that in 2025, more Indigenous people than ever previously recorded died in custody in NSW (12).
So many things skipped past. Just three months ago, the alleged planned act of terrorism in Western Australia: a bomb, stuffed with screws and ball bearings, tossed into an Invasion Day gathering of more than 2000 people. So little attention.
You might say that these are topics we are not particularly good at addressing as a nation – except that this would be putting things the wrong way round. Better to say that we are particularly good at not addressing these topics. We have practised and practised. That is how you perfect a skill.
Another record of sorts may be set this weekend, in the electorate of Farrer, if One Nation for the first time takes victory in a federal lower house seat. One Nation largely targets Muslims now, but we should not forget one of Pauline Hanson’s earliest successes in gaining attention: a letter to The Queensland Times, in which she wrote of Indigenous Australians: “How can you expect this race to help themselves when government showers them with money, facilities and opportunities that only these people can obtain no matter how minute the indigenous blood that is flowing through their veins, and this is what is causing racism.”
This may be – inadvertently – the most honest thing Hanson has written. Not because it is accurate, but because it is a true picture of her beliefs. Yes, racism exists, she concedes – but it is caused by the failings of those peoples and those who attempt to redress the wrongs done to them. And not, of course, by those who spend their lives attempting to gain politically from spreading racism.
A parallel: a week ago, the alternative prime minister of this country, Angus Taylor, issued the standard condemnation of booing at the Welcomes and Acknowledgments to Country on Anzac Day. Then, immediately, he moved on to justify the sentiment underlying it. Yes, booing was bad – but also, he said, without prompting, you can understand why people are frustrated. Another thing not quite said but left implied: the idea that fault lies partly with those who insist on such rituals. Indigenous people, again, blamed for what is done to them.
This is a low form of politics – to decry something you know you are expected to decry, while making clear in the same breath that you have no conviction on the topic at all.
We are not all politicians. But non-Indigenous Australians like myself risk a similar hypocrisy if, having expressed our sorrow over the death of Kumanjayi Little Baby, we move on, ignoring other deaths or the silences and failings – of politicians and Australians broadly – that make them possible.
With the political class falling over itself to talk about “social cohesion”, we should remember that we have failed, so often, to meet that challenge in the first place it presented itself to our nation, by taking the simple step of treating suffering the same, whoever suffers. Commissioner Katie Kiss put it like this: “My greatest hope is that Kumanjayi Little Baby’s short life becomes a turning point – that in this country, the life of an Indigenous child is valued, protected and pursued with the same urgency as any other child.”
The quiet implication of that sentence is devastating.
Sean Kelly is a regular columnist and a former adviser to prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.
Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.Connect via X.