Systemic racism is not a glitch in our institutions, it is a design feature – and the seeds of it lie in our constitution
In my years of reading reports, attending inquests and watching new inquiries restate old findings, I have asked myself the same question that haunts so many Indigenous lawyers, activists and academics: why does nothing change?
The machinery of reform keeps turning. Policies are rewritten, programs renamed, strategies relaunched. Each generation of government promises transformation. And yet the outcomes remain stubbornly familiar. Rates of incarceration continue to rise. Indigenous children are removed from their families at ever higher numbers. After a while, the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.