Page 491 - Week 02 - Thursday, 14 May 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
I understand that this report has been the basis for some bids by the Government under the Aboriginal health strategy, although I do not know whether it needs to be updated to improve the availability of that money. I would be interested to hear from the Chief Minister in due course more about the way in which this bid is proceeding and, in particular, about what its likely outcome would be.
Madam Speaker, I have some concerns about the question of data collection, and I have raised this already in the Assembly. In question time on 9 April I asked the Chief Minister about the rate of incarceration of Aboriginals in the ACT, or by ACT courts, and she was unable to give me some basic data about that at the time. She said in response to my question:
I think that the rate of incarceration in the ACT is something that we do not have accurate data on and we will, indeed, be looking to collect that data.
She also said:
We have every reason to suppose that these people in the ACT face the same degree of difficulty that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people face everywhere in the country and that we need as a Government, and indeed as a community, to address those problems.
It seems to me to be pretty alarming that we are proposing to spend our share of the $150m package that has been put forward by the Federal Government to deal with the problem of Aboriginal deaths in custody when we, in fact, have what the Chief Minister has called a supposed problem. I am not saying that the Chief Minister is wrong; let me make that quite clear. I am merely saying that perhaps we should have done more work before committing ourselves to take part in this strategy.
The commission found, for example, that Aboriginals were 29 times more likely to be in gaol than non-Aboriginals. I would expect, Madam Speaker, that, if the rate of incarceration of Aboriginals in the ACT was 29 times the rate for non-Aboriginals, ACT Corrective Services would know about it, even without hard figures; that the police would know about it; and that therefore the ACT Government would know about it. Apparently there is no general impression even available about what exactly is happening in our ACT courts and legal system. For any given instance of imprisonment, the chance of an Aboriginal dying was actually slightly less, according to the commission, than of a European or an Anglo-Celt, if you like, dying in custody.
The debate then shifted from what happened to Aboriginals when in custody to the very high number of Aboriginals that found themselves in custody in the first place and in gaol, in particular. The fact is that the Aboriginals are the most imprisoned race in the world. That point is quite central to the entire debate. Yet here in the ACT we simply do not know what the scale of the problem is because we do not have the facts, or at least we do not have a complete set of facts.
Having asked that question of the Chief Minister, I went to look at such other evidence as was available and I noticed that in the "Paying the price" report on the need for an ACT gaol there is some evidence about rates of incarceration of Aboriginals. The rate of Aboriginals sentenced to serving orders, non-custodial orders in the ACT, appears to be slightly higher than the incidence of Aboriginal people in the ACT.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .