Page 801 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 20 March 2019
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
homeless since the age of 13 and, given his tendency to occupy public areas, has had regular contact with police.
In some instances, this contact led to charges, including resisting arrest and offensive language charges. E was issued with several consorting warnings for associating with his peers in public areas such as the local mall. After receiving these warning, he would become upset and confused, stating that he had not committed any crime and that he lives with the people he had been warned about consorting with.
The appropriateness of issuing consorting warnings in these circumstances was raised by youth service staff at an integrated case management panel meeting involving Corrective Services New South Wales, police, Juvenile Justice and New South Wales Housing, and attended by the commander of the local area command.
Madam Speaker, we are committed to the development of a disability justice strategy in this government. I am absolutely committed to ensuring that our justice system becomes a fairer and more accessible system for people with a disability, not a less fair and more punitive system for people with a disability through the introduction of ineffective laws that risk further targeting and further penalising people who already have difficulty engaging with the justice system and who we already know are over-represented in their interactions with police and corrective services.
In his review of the laws, Professor John McMillan stated that the anti-consorting laws introduced to declare outlaw motorcycle gangs illegal criminal organisations had failed. He said:
We have concluded that the Act does not provide police with a viable mechanism to tackle criminal organisations, and is unlikely to ever be able to be used effectively.
The ombudsman recommended that the laws in New South Wales be repealed but also outlined how they had failed in Queensland and South Australia, and lain fallow in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Yet here we are debating a bill to implement measures that are proven to have failed where they already exist.
Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health and Community Services chief executive, Julie Tongs, has publicly expressed concern that, as in New South Wales, if anti-consorting laws were to be introduced in the ACT they would be used to target Aboriginal people, the homeless and young people. Ms Tongs said:
You can’t just have blanket legislation impacting on the vulnerable …
She went on to say:
A lot of Aboriginal people are already targeted by the police, so it just gives them another avenue to arrest people.
Minister Rattenbury has already talked about the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in our justice system, another unacceptable fact that
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video