Yes campaign launch in WA hears anger over Indigenous incarceration and child removal

Dorinda Cox urged people to ensure ‘that our First Peoples are recognised in the constitution’. Photograph: Matt Jelonek/Getty Images

Labor senator and Aboriginal elder Patrick Dodson has spoken of the need to pull the nation out of the “dark days of the colonial era” as attendees at the West Australian launch of the yes campaign voiced anger over the state’s high rate of Indigenous incarceration and the troubled Banksia Hill youth detention centre.

Hundreds packed the forum on Thursday night on Nyungar land, at Curtin University in Perth’s south-east, as the state joined the nationwide “voice week of action” aimed at winning the referendum set for the end of this year.