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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 3 Hansard (8 March) . . Page.. 700 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Another interesting example is a local one. In hearings of the Justice and Community Safety Committee, Mr Humphries gave us a list of interests that would be represented on the community panel for the prison. I commented on the fact that a women's health person or the Women's Legal Centre was not on the panel but the Bar Association and the Law Society were. Mr Humphries said, "I have heard that the Women's Legal Centre is interested but I said they could share a position with Welfare Rights". But there are two distinct positions for the Law Society and the Bar Association. What is that saying? Is that saying the Women's Legal Centre is exactly the same as Welfare Rights? Of course they are not. He could not possibly argue that.

I said, "Why is a women's health person not on the panel for issues of drug abuse among women?". Research of women in detention shows clearly that there are very specific issues for women in prison. They are medicated, particularly with benzodiazepines. Quite often they are overmedicated. That is the way prison people respond to the depression that women often experience in prison. So there are really good reasons to have a women's health person on the panel. Mr Humphries said, "There are not going to be many women, or we might not have any, because it might cost too much. So you would not need these groups on the committee".

Another argument he put was that the main panel would be able to feed out to other groups. My question has to be: Why is it that the women's groups should be fed out to and not central? To be fair, the Women's Consultative Council is on that panel, but that is a broad group. I do not know exactly what its expertise is, but I do know that there is a women's group forming from women's service agencies in the ACT who want to have a voice on that panel and who are experts in the area. They certainly should be respected.

Another example was the recent discussion on mandatory sentencing that I had here. The gender impact of mandatory sentencing has received little attention, but it was shocking to me to see that, since mandatory sentencing was introduced, there has been a 232 per cent increase in women in prison, greater than the increase for men. That is because before mandatory sentencing the judiciary took into account that many women had babies and children. For that reason, they were not imprisoned.

Anyone interested in cycles of poverty, violence and social disadvantage would probably agree it is not real good to separate children from their mothers. So it is probably not useful to put the mothers in prison. Therefore, it is good for the judiciary to have some discretion. The policy of the Northern Territory has had a disproportionate impact on women. That is just another example of the impact on women of a particular policy.

I have been reading some information generally on women and public policy. One paper reported on the social justice report card concept. This concept was used in Victoria last year to look at the impact of Kennett's policies and approach to governance on disadvantaged people. In justifying the focus on women in the community, People Together, the group that did the social justice report card, chose to concentrate on one group of vulnerable people to assess the Government's performance on social justice. They said:

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