Aboriginal Youth Suicide Goes from Very Bad to Much Worse

In 2014, the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO) reported that teenage suicide in the Aboriginal communities of Western Australia’s far north Kimberley district had become a social catastrophe. It said teenage suicide in local Aboriginal communities had gone from “being an extremely rare phenomenon to one where the rate … is now the highest in the world”.[1]

It was four times higher for young Aborigi­nal men than non-Aboriginal young men in Australia, and five times higher among Aboriginal women. In some remote Kimberley communities, the rate had reached 100 times the national suicide average.

In the eyes of Western Australian state authorities, NACCHO was not reporting anything new. The causes of the tragedy had already been investigated and publicised in 2008 in a report of the Western Australian state coroner, Alistair Hope. However, Aboriginal politics of the kind that now wants the Albanese government to implement their ideas in…