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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 3 Hansard (8 March) . . Page.. 665 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

school failure, deviant peer group, bullying and inadequate behaviour management; life factors of divorce and family break-up or death of a family member; and community and cultural factors of low income and poor housing, neighbourhood violence and crime, and lack of support services.

It can readily be seen that these matters cannot be addressed by the criminal justice system. They must be addressed by the community of parents, teachers and other significant persons in the child's life. When we as a legislature, as a community, look at how to treat children committing criminal acts and look for an explanation, we should look at those factors. We should look at the range of childhood factors - the difficult temperaments, the poor social skills. We should look at the family factors - the breakdown, the lack of parenting skills, unemployment, long-term abuse. We should look at the school factors - kids not achieving at school, being bullied at school and being inadequately managed.

There are life factors that children have absolutely no influence over. Their parents may divorce. They may come from a violent family. The family may be dysfunctional. One or both parents may have died. There are all the community and cultural factors I mentioned - low income, poor housing, neighbourhood violence. This is what crime is born from. An interface between children of eight and the police, between children of eight and the court system, between children of eight and the criminal justice system, does not address a single one of those factors. It comes too late. The issues will not have been addressed and will never be addressed once the child becomes part of the criminal justice system.

A young person's involvement in their court appearance is usually very peripheral. It is most often a dialogue between professionals, a discussion between a magistrate, a lawyer, a police officer, welfare officers and all those who become part of that case. The child is simply a spectator. We have seen that in the coverage of some of the notorious cases that have been mentioned. The child offender, the person we are concerned about, is just a spectator in a performance by a range of professionals desperately seeking an appropriate response to a child who is acting in such an antisocial, deviant and criminal way for reasons that almost certainly the child does not understand.

In the case of adults this is not always good practice and is not always good politics. It is certainly not good economics. In the case of children it is not in the child's best interests and can be counterproductive. I am talking here about the imposition of a severe and a more punitive criminal justice system and exposing to the criminal justice system everybody who offends against accepted mores. That is not good practice and it is certainly not good economics. It is not good for the children faced with those circumstances. I do not think anybody can seriously suggest that it can ever be in the best interests of a child to be confronted with, or to become part of, the criminal justice system.

From the debate we have had about a prison for the ACT, we know that it costs the ACT about $180 per day for each person in custody. We are going to spend about $34m on a prison. If we examined the records of the prisoners we are spending this money on, we would find that often their careers got off to an early start. It would surely be better to

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