The federal Aboriginal intervention policy is failing its mission

Children in remote areas need coherent strategies to ensure a positive future.

I was supposed to go to the funeral of a young Aboriginal man from a remote community yesterday. He killed himself just a month ago and I'm close to his family - culture-way I call him "grandson" - but I didn't go. There are just too many funerals to be able to attend them all. Where I work, there is a queue of people to be buried. When this young man died, he had to wait in line to be buried - an elderly lady, a middle-aged woman, and a 14-year-old girl (also a suicide victim) were scheduled before him.

The death of this young man is nothing new to this community. It is new to the family, but such tragic events happen regularly in the community. At one point, we had 31 young people attempt suicide in the space of eight months - 8 per cent of the population of 452 people. Some of these young people had been the victims of white pedophiles.

Both Liberal and Labor governments, territory and federal, have known of the high suicide rate among young Aborigines for at least the past decade but have done nothing substantive to change the situation.