Pressure builds for coronial inquest into Port Hedland triple murder

The federal Aboriginal minister has backed a West Australian grandmother’s pleas for a coronial inquest into the deaths of her three grandchildren at the hands of their Indigenous mother.

Indigenous Australians Minister Malarndirri McCarthy said she supported the campaign by Dororthy Papertalk, grandmother to the three children murdered in Port Hedland in Western Australia in 2022.

“What I want to do ... is support Mrs Papertalk in terms of her grandchildren and wanting to have an inquest into what happened and the circumstances leading (to) that,” she told News 24 on Monday

“There is something not right in that region,” she added.

The federal minister urged the state Labor government to continue working with the families on the ground to “get to the heart of these matters, especially around poverty and neglect”.

But WA Attorney-General Tony Buti has said he cannot overrule the coroner’s decision not to hold an inquest unless fresh evidence is brought forward, despite criticisms from legal experts.

Margaret Dale Hawke is serving a life sentence for stabbing, strangling and suffocating her 10-year-old daughter and two sons, aged seven and four months, before burning their bodies in a house fire in July 2022.

The political momentum for a probe to be opened comes after reports last month in The Australian newspaper that described more than a dozen children living unsupervised in squalor in a South Hedland home, about 1600km north of Perth.

The report triggered a political firestorm in the state, with accusations of neglect, in a repeat of the reaction to the deaths of Mrs Papertalk’s grandchildren in 2022.

Aboriginal Elders have called for a Royal Commission into WA’s child protection agency, and for Child Protection Minister Jessica Stojkovski to resign.

Opposition spokeswoman Libby Mettam added her voice to the growing chorus of support for Ms Papertalk.

“What is the Cook Labor government afraid an independent coronial inquest will find?,” she said in a Facebook post.

“Dorothy and her family deserve answers, and the community deserves to know how these failures were allowed to happen.”

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