CANBERRA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Australia should be embarrassed about the way it treats Indigenous Australians, according to the son of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Junior.

Martin Luther King III said Australia's Indigenous people were worse off than when he first visited the country two decades ago.

"For some reason, there's been this desire to re-oppress people who are already oppressed," he said during a visit to Alice Springs in the Northern Territory for Reconciliation Week.

"Here I am 20 years later and I don't see much has changed. In fact, I'm greatly disappointed in what I've seen in how the First Nations people are treated."

A civil rights activist like his father, King visited the Whitegate camp near Alice Springs, which had its water supply turned off in 2014.

"There's no logical, legitimate reason why water at a minimum should not get to Whitegate," he was reported as saying on ABC Online. "That has to change," he said. "It's inhumane, it's unacceptable, it's insensitive.

"And I just want to ask, how do you justify mistreating human beings who really were here first? "