An Indigenous person my age, 28, is six times more likely to kill themselves on this land they own than I am.
This week is NAIDOC week, the most significant occasion we take to celebrate the culture of First Australians and our Aboriginal community. It's as good an occasion as any to spare a thought for our often silent minority and our treatment of them, both as people and as a people.
About 5.6 per cent of the population of the town I live in, Glen Innes NSW, is Indigenous. That is double the state average. Our future as a town is literally in their hands because they are on average much younger than the white population. Some 14 per cent of the high school is Indigenous. This is an experience across regional Australia - and the more regional, the more Indigenous.
Indigenous issues are extremely pressing, but ignored. They were barely mentioned in the recent federal election.
One statistic says it all. We are in an acknowledged epidemic of regional suicide: Australian male farmers kill themselves at around double the national average (32 per 10000). But for Aboriginal people it is far worse. For young Indigenous adults between 25 and 29 the rate is six times higher (91 per 100,000). Of all youth suicides in Australia, 80 per cent are Aboriginal; from only 2.8 per cent of the population.
These rates are up from more or less zero a generation ago. If Indigenous Australians had a country, it would have the second highest suicide rate in the history of the world.
In my opinion this is the worst mental health crisis in Australian history by far.
And yet the Nationals - the party that by rights should be of and for Indigenous people - has voted to slash Indigenous drug and alcohol services, Indigenous legal aid, and chosen to expand mandatory income management by imposing it on poor whites, after its experimentation on Indigenous Australians proved that policy a failure.
Above all our Federal Government has chosen to ignore the unprecedented consensus of Australia's first people contained within the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart.
In part as a result of this continued top-down approach Australia has made little progress towards closing the life expectancy gap between our two communities.
Government can afford a $158bn tax cut for Australia's wealthiest people. It must choose to afford to make this country a decent place for Australia's most disadvantaged as well.
Andrew Messenger is an ACM journalist from Glen Innes NSW.
