Page 2726 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 12 August 2015
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Indigenous people. Recruitment and training are now underway to expand the program to also manage domestic violence and sexual offences from the beginning of 2018.
We do tend to think about these programs solely in the context of the criminal justice process in some way. But in fact we could be thinking and asking questions about how a restorative approach would operate in a broader context in our community—how it would work, for example, in terms of human resource management and how it would work in terms of conflicts and misbehaviour in civil society more broadly, whether that is sporting groups or other groups like that. There are great opportunities for us to look at this restorative approach in a broader way.
To that end, I recently hosted a conference here at the Legislative Assembly—the “Towards a restorative community conference”. Guest speakers were leading academics from overseas and from the ANU. They were talking about how the ACT could draw upon its very significant leadership role over the past decade when it comes to restorative justice for juveniles and how restorative practices could become more mainstream in dealing with conflict and disputes in our community.
MADAM SPEAKER: A supplementary question, Ms Porter.
MS PORTER: Attorney, what other evidence is there that restorative justice has been successful in the ACT?
MR CORBELL: I thank Ms Porter for her supplementary. What I can say is that the success of restorative justice in the ACT has been extensively reviewed, including by the Australian Institute of Criminology and by the global Campbell Collaboration systematic review of restorative justice conferencing using face-to-face meetings of offenders and victims.
The Campbell Collaboration, which reviewed the effectiveness of restorative justice schemes around the world and compared them against each other, confirmed that the process of restorative justice demonstrates positive results for offenders and victims and is also very cost beneficial. The review reported clear and compelling evidence of a beneficial relationship between restorative justice conferencing and subsequent reoffending over a two-year period. Nine out of 10 results showed that restorative justice conferences were more effective than a court process alone.
Since 31 January 2005 and up to the end of June this year the ACT Restorative Justice Unit had received over 1,600 referrals for over 3,800 offences involving approximately 2,800 victims and over 2,000 young offenders. It had convened 692 face-to-face conferences, 437 indirect conferences and had seen a broad range of participants.
The respondents to a survey on the effectiveness of the program have confirmed a very high level of support, including, amongst others, that 98 per cent of all respondents said they felt they were treated with respect, 98 per cent felt they were able to have their say, 97 per cent felt the process was fair to them, 97 per cent felt the
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