Now a police officer has been charged with Walker's murder. Since 1991, there have been more than 400 Aboriginal deaths in custody. Those are the ones we know about.

There is so much we don't know about. Aboriginal people are once again being marginalised, excluded from seats of power, their visibility diminished.

Just before the 2013 election, then-prime minister Kevin Rudd said he would add three new targets to the Close the Gap policy - justice, disability and higher education. There was a lot wrong with Kevin Rudd, and he wasn't the most consultative person in the world - but he identified what mattered for Aboriginal people and tried to put that on the national stage.

Not long after that election, it became very clear that the Coalition government had other priorities. Australia's most damaging budget, the 2014 catastrophe driven by treasurer Joe Hockey, cut $534 million from Aboriginal programs, including more than $160 million of cuts to Indigenous health programs. That was the same budget where the government revealed the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples would not get $15 million earmarked for the representative body over the next three years.

This government's approach to Aboriginal people is to take away their voice and their power, to refuse to recognise the harms of colonisation. Just two weeks ago came the decision not to proceed with the Voice to Parliament. Now comes the news that the Indigenous Affairs Council hasn't met since February and is being reviewed - but worse, the National Family Violence Prevention and Legal Services secretariat understands it will have its funding axed in June next year. That body was the peak voice for those front-line services dealing specifically with Aboriginal women and their children experiencing family violence.

Shadow minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney is appalled: "We are seeing a pattern emerge where the government on one hand says they want to work with Aboriginal people and then the PM is doing everything to demonstrate he is not doing that at all."

She says the grossest example is the rollout of the cashless welfare card in the Northern Territory, with no proper consultation and no informed consent. Burney describes this as the arbitrary nature of the Prime Minister determining both consultative and advisory arrangements - the rhetoric doesn't match the actions. Burney is shocked by the decision to cut the national voice for family violence organisations.

A spokesperson for the Minister for Indigenous Australians says that the money for the national voice is now being channelled to front-line services. Which you'd have to argue is not the same as having a forum which advocates for these services. No voice, no power.

"The lesson must be understood that unless there are Aboriginal voices at the decision-making table then the decisions will not address the issue, whatever it is - health, education, justice. We must be in true and equal partnership," says Burney.

True and equal partnership. There's an old saying: nothing about us without us.

On Thursday night, Antoinette Braybrook, who is the national convener of the aforementioned secretariat, told the audience at the Sydney Peace Prize about the multiple burdens Aboriginal women bear. They are the women 32 times more likely to be hospitalised because of family violence, the women 10 times more like to die as a result of violent assault, the women whose children are twice as likely to be stillborn, who are five times as likely to suicide. The women who die nine years earlier than other women.

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We stand transfixed at a death in custody, as we must. We know Ms Dhu, an Aboriginal woman, was treated in an "unprofessional and inhumane" way by Western Australian police, "well below the standards that should ordinarily be expected" before she died in custody in 2014.

The coroner Ros Fogliani released CCTV footage of Dhu's time in custody, save for a final scene that showed her very close to death at hospital. Fogliani said the footage was "profoundly disturbing". But there are times we don't get disturbed. There are so many deaths of Aboriginal women and children we don't even know about. The stillbirths don't make the news, nor do the endless assaults. Sometimes we hear about the deaths of women in remote communities - yet we don't understand how and why they died.

Aboriginal people are sick to death of having decision-making taken out of their hands. Nothing about them without them.