‘Genocide’: Patrick Dodson condemns Australia’s Aboriginal youth incarceration rates

Former Labor senator also says child removals are a way to eradicate a people from the landscape'

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Former Labor senator Patrick Dodson has condemned the country's Aboriginal youth incarceration rates and child removals as an ongoing genocide against First Peoples and an embarrassing sore" on the nation.

It's an assault on the Aboriginal people. I don't say that lightly [but] if you want to eradicate a people from the landscape, you start taking them away, you start destroying the landscape of their cultural heritage, you attack their children or remove their children," Dodson said.

Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email