Major parties block federal ban on shackling birthing prisoners, deferring to states that perpetuate colonial carceral violence against Indigenous women
Original framing: “Labor and Coalition block bill to stop incarcerated women being shackled in childbirth” — The Guardian - World
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women experience shackling not as an isolated procedural failure but as a continuation of the stolen generations' logic: the state asserting sovereignty over Indigenous reproduction. The bill's blockade by both major parties mirrors the 1997 Bringing Them Home report's finding that child removal policies were 'genocidal' — here, the violence occurs at the moment of birth. Indigenous midwifery frameworks (e.g., the Congress of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nurses and Midwives' Birthing on Country models) demonstrate that cultural safety requires dismantling carceral power, not regulating its edges.
The blockade of Senator Thorpe's bill is not a jurisdictional dispute but a deliberate maintenance of colonial carceral power over Indigenous women's reproduction — a power exercised through the federalist shell game that lets the Commonwealth fund prisons while disclaiming responsibility for what occurs inside them.
The 34-year gap since the Royal Commission's Recommendation 168, the exclusion of formerly incarcerated women's testimony from Hansard, and the bipartisan refusal to use spending power to enforce the Bangkok Rules all reveal a system working as designed: producing gendered racial violence while generating plausible deniability. The solutions exist — funding conditionality, decarceration, Indigenous-governed oversight — but they require confronting the truth that Australia's prison system is not broken for Indigenous women; it is functioning exactly as the frontier intended. The trickster's lesson is that the jurisdiction line is the weapon; the only way through is to refuse the game entirely.