Page 5993 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 8 December 2010
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extremely carefully, and if there is any suggestion at all that there are some issues around people not—
Mr Seselja: I’m sure they will be fearing your scrutiny there, Meredith.
MS HUNTER: If there are some fears, Mr Seselja, that people are not cooperating with the inquiry or people are feeling unsafe, that certainly will be taken up. And the other point is that if there is any suggestion that the final human rights audit or the final inquiry report from the Children and Young People Commissioner has been censored or messed with in some way, that also will become a major issue.
This does need to be transparent. We do need to get it done. At the end of the day, what we want in the ACT is the best juvenile justice system that we could possibly have. It does need to be human rights compliant, because at the end of the day we need to go back to who this is about. This is about young people who find themselves part of the community justice system—the youth community justice unit or detained in Bimberi.
We need to ensure that we are providing a system that has opportunities to rehabilitate, opportunities to learn new skills and opportunities around different ways of living—healthy, productive and satisfying ways of being able to conduct lives that involve new skills that will be able to allow the person to go for further education or get employment. It is about the families of these young people, many of whom do need extra support in order to be able to move forward. And it is also about the workers. This is why I do not want this to be blown up into a circus: it should not be about demonising—
Mr Seselja: That is what the Inquiries Act is—
MS HUNTER: Mr Seselja, it should not be about demonising the young people who are in the youth justice system or their families—or the workers, who are dedicated to working within that system, to supporting young people, to ensuring that there are good outcomes at the end of the day.
We need to have a process that will properly inquire, will properly follow up the allegations and will also look into what sort of education programs we are providing, what sort of opportunities we are giving, what sort of diversionary strategies are in place and whether they are working or not working and how we can improve it. We need to be looking at the range of things that have been detailed in Mrs Dunne’s motion and my amendments to ensure that at the end of the day we are going to have not only a human rights compliant youth justice system but also a youth justice system that very much puts those young people at the heart of it and that puts rehabilitation at the heart of it as well.
That is the important thing to remember here. That is why today I believe that my amendments to Mrs Dunne’s motion around a human rights audit and also the inquiry by the Children and Young People Commissioner, with these extended terms of reference, is the way to go. I believe that that will provide good outcomes. It certainly will be around a transparent pathway, a pathway where, at the end of the day, we will end up with a vastly improved juvenile justice system here in the ACT.
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