Page 3731 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 23 November 2022
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First Nations women in this city are being locked up at a rate that is nearly 50 times—not 50 per cent but 50 times—greater than other women. This is not only the worst ratio in Australia but it is more than double the national average.
We are not staying still, either. Whilst the incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has increased across Australia over the last decade, it has increased faster here in Canberra than anywhere else. Admissions of First Nations people into prison have ballooned by an average of 5.7 per cent annually.
If these data were not bad enough, the most recent ABS Prisoners in Australia report revealed that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander recidivism rate here is likewise the worst in the nation, with 94 per cent of Indigenous detainees at the Alexander Maconochie Centre having a prior conviction. The ACT government keeps locking up Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, but then fails to provide the support and services necessary to ensure that most of them never return.
Detainees have had no access to structured education for over a year now. Diversity of employment opportunities remains limited, as does access to computers and higher education. The promised reintegration centre still has not been funded. Years after it was created, the transitional release centre has not been optimised. These kinds of failures should be unthinkable in the nation’s capital. For the city’s Indigenous population, this is their reality.
Troubled by this reality, in July 2020 Ms Julie Tongs, CEO of Winnunga, wrote to the former Attorney-General seeking “a detailed, comprehensive and independent inquiry” into the justice system and its contact with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community members. This letter led to a government roundtable with community leaders on 25 March last year. According to internal documents, government ministers were prepared to “strongly support an Our Booris, Our Way type model for a review”. Instead community leaders unanimously asked for a fully independent board of inquiry.
I remind those opposite that, to date, this unanimous request has never been walked back. Likewise, I remind those opposite that, to date, this Labor-Greens government has still not agreed. I have repeatedly stood up in this place to support this request from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community leaders—something I am proud of. In every case, the response from Labor and the Greens has been no. On the first sitting day of 2021 I moved a motion that called on the government to “commission and fund an external, independent inquiry”, as requested by community leaders. During that debate, Dr Paterson had a prime opportunity to signal her support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. As the record shows, however, she instead voted in lock step with her Labor and Greens colleagues to slash an external, independent inquiry from the motion. I assure Dr Paterson that Indigenous people can distinguish between her genuine support when they need it and political stunts like she has done today.
Earlier I mentioned the Our Booris, Our Way review, intended to reduce the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people in the territory’s child protection system. It has now been four years and five months since the steering committee presented its first recommendations to the ACT
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