Page 301 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 9 February 2021
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But institutional or systemic racism can also mean an environment in which those individual acts of racism that we all know do occur from time to time are not called out or addressed. The recent discussion of Collingwood Football Club’s experience has highlighted the devastating impact that institutional racism can have on individuals and ultimately on organisations.
In the ACT, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community leaders have been proactive in pushing the government to do more and do better in relation to outcomes for their community, and this includes the ACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elected Body, which has identified that addressing systemic racism must be a whole-of-government priority under the ACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Agreement.
The over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in our justice system is an issue of deep concern to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and to the ACT government. The ACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Agreement 2019-2028 includes justice as a significant focus area. The government is committed to building on our justice reinvestment approach to deliver on the targets of the agreement. In national discussions on Closing the Gap targets, the ACT consistently supported strong and ambitious targets for justice and youth justice.
For our own justice system as a whole, we have set a target to reduce recidivism by 25 per cent by 2025. We have said that we want to build communities, not prisons. But there is no doubt that we have more to do to achieve these targets. We know that there is no single answer, but we also know that the best answers, the answers most likely to deliver real change, will come from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities themselves.
The most effective services, the supports that are most likely to change the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander individuals and families will be delivered by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and organisations. That is why the then Attorney General, Gordon Ramsay, and I last year committed to a review of the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the justice system that would be led by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
For me, this is in a similar way to the Our Booris, Our Way review that has been led, steered and driven by a wholly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander steering committee and has delivered real change—not as fast as we would all like to see but real change in addressing the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families in the child protection system in numbers and experience.
That has been an eye-opening experience, I think, for the Community Services Directorate and for the ACT government in the way that we work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. For this review, it is important that it is not seen as a first step, nor as the last step, and certainly not as the only step in our efforts to eliminate institutional racism and the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the justice system.
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