Page 2053 - Week 07 - Thursday, 20 August 2020
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change, as we already have so few children in custody. It is an entirely solvable problem, and a place where we can give these children a brighter future. In saying that, I acknowledge the work of a number of other ministers and agencies.
The work in the youth justice space over many years now has seen very few children under the age of 14 held in custody in the Bimberi Youth Justice Centre. I appreciate the recent comments from the Attorney-General, Minister Ramsay, as reported in the Canberra Times, that he:
… understand[s] the detrimental effect that facing the courts and spending time in detention can have on children …
and that:
… the ACT government is committed to progressing this important issue as a uniform change across Australia through the Council of Attorneys-General.
But I simply do not believe that we can continue to wait for the collective membership of the commonwealth to form consensus on this issue. It is clear that, despite the best intentions of some at the council table, this issue has slowed to what I consider to be a glacial pace. I also genuinely struggle to see the merits in the arguments that some have put forward that there must be a nationally consistent model.
Each and every state and territory has different laws and legislation, different child protection and youth justice systems and criminal codes. In this context, where each jurisdiction has a similar but different approach, there is no clear reason why we should be held back while other jurisdictions drag their feet. We do not have uniform national criminal laws. That is the context in which I make these remarks.
Australia’s minimum age of criminal responsibility of 10 is well and truly out of step with the rest of the world, and we have been chastised by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, which recommends raising the age to 14. The doctors from the Australian Medical Association have found that sending children to prison can cause them lifelong harm, increase rates of mental illness and trauma, and even lead to early death. Raising the age responds to recommendations made recently by the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory. The legal fraternity, civil society, medical practitioners and service providers alike from all over the country are calling for this change. So, in our view, we should not wait. I do not believe that we do need to wait.
I understand and respect that careful work is required to ensure that we maintain community safety. Some young offenders may, indeed, pose a risk of harm to others and themselves. I am not naively suggesting that, in a very small number of cases, some children will not require much higher levels of supervision and support than others. That is why I am calling for the government to recognise the need to resource new programs and implement new policy frameworks to support young offenders under the age of 14, to get the balance right. We have already seen some successes with the family group conferencing that is being offered through Gugan Gulwan and the Yarrabi Bamirr program provided by Winnunga, which works with families as a
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