Robert McClelland (Barton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I start by commending the member for Gippsland. I thought that was an outstanding contribution. In my 17 years, as of 2 March this year, in federal parliament, I have not sensed such a unity between the parties on any issue as on this issue. I think it is a great thing for our country and it is an opportunity to take some really significant steps. We have done a lot, but there is a long way to go. My contribution today will focus on what I believe to be a necessity in the Closing the Gap targets—that is, added to those six specific targets, we should be adding the target of reducing both victimisation and incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

In terms of victimisation, statistics show that Indigenous people are almost twice as likely as non-Indigenous people to have been a victim of physical or threatened violence. Indigenous women are 31 times more likely than non-Indigenous women to be admitted to hospital for injuries caused by assault. Their children are 31 times more likely to witness their mum, their grandma or their sister being the victim of an assault than the broader Australian community. In remote areas Indigenous people are hospitalised as a result of family violence at 35 times the rate of the rest of Australia. In Indigenous communities the victim and offender are intimate partners 60 per cent of the time as compared to 24 per cent of the time for non-Indigenous Australians. Indeed, in the case of homicides, similarly, 60 per cent of homicides in Indigenous communities are between intimate partners whereas it is one-quarter of the homicides in the broader community. These are appalling figures, and there is no question that the people who commit those crimes should be incarcerated. That is unquestionably an appropriate response to those crimes.

Equally, we need to assess whether our strategies are appropriately graduated. There is a strong argument that high levels of incarceration, particularly for minor offences such as traffic offences and non-payment of fines, may ultimately undermine our objective of safer communities. For instance, in New South Wales I think you have to get about 120 hours of driving experience up before you get a licence. The expense of that for some members of Indigenous communities is prohibitive. If they are at a remote location and they require transport, whatever may be the need of the journey, they will frequently drive unlicensed. The consequence of that is a fine if they are apprehended. The consequence of non-payment of those fines, in some states at least, can be incarceration. There are strategies in place, and a number of volunteers are now in Indigenous communities teaching young people to drive, to prevent the rate of fines and, consequently in some communities, incarceration. That is a lateral approach to imprisoning young people because they are driving without a licence.

I can give you some of the percentages in terms of the broader community. Today Indigenous Australians make up only 2.5 per cent of the population but they account for 26 per cent of the adult prison population. The incarceration rate of Indigenous adults is 14 times higher than non-Indigenous adults. Between 2000 and 2010 the rate at which Indigenous women were incarcerated increased by 58 per cent. That is, in our most recent past decade, the rate of incarceration of Indigenous women increased by 50 per cent. The rate at which Indigenous men are incarcerated increased by over a third to 35 per cent.

Of greatest concern, however, is that those figures are even higher for Indigenous juveniles. Only five per cent of young Australians are Indigenous, but half of the young people in detention—in prison and juvenile detention—are Indigenous. Indeed, Indigenous young Australians are 28 times more likely to be in detention than non-Indigenous Australians. We have apologised, and we had reason to apologise, for the stolen generation. We are at the precipice of a lost generation because of the rate of incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. In fact, Indigenous young people are more likely to be incarcerated today than at any time since the release of the reports of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody more than 20 years ago. In other words, the situation is getting worse; it is not getting better, and this is not good enough.

Experts have talked about the marginal effect of incarceration in terms of reducing crime. Indeed, evidence suggests today that excessive imprisonment rates, particularly for those relatively minor offences that I have referred to—fine default, traffic offences and so forth—may actually cause more crime in the longer term. Professor Dave Brown, who must be getting on a bit because he taught me at university, makes the point that prisons can become schools of crime which result in the fracturing of family and community ties, hardening and brutalisation, and poor mental health outcomes for those who have been incarcerated. After an offender is released they are likely to have lost essential life skills, have an increased reliance on criminal networks that they have built up in prison, and experience reduced employment opportunities and access to social programs. This is a profound and worrying situation in Indigenous communities because it simply leads to recidivism, where they go around the cycle again and then end up in either juvenile detention or prison. Prof. Brown also points out that studies have shown that there may be a tipping point for certain communities where, once incarceration reaches a certain level, crime in the community will actually increase. Instead of it being a deterrent, it becomes a rite of passage where it is an expectation—or indeed a thing of pride—to have served your time in prison, as opposed to what we know: that prison should be very much a deterrent and very much the local community saying that this conduct is unacceptable.

Concerningly and tragically, this trend is intergenerational. The Corrective Services NSW Women's Advisory Council's submission to the Doing Time inquiry, which was a report of this parliament—and I commend that report to all members; I think it is an outstanding report—gave the account of one of their experts. The expert said, 'When I was going to Mulawa prison,'—this is the women's prison—'a young woman came up to me and introduced me to her mother and grandmother, who were also incarcerated.' Three generations: grandmother, mother and child were incarcerated. They had all been in custody and were all in Mulawa, in the women's jail, together. It was not remarkable to them; it was simply something that happens. That is three generations, all living generations, incarcerated in the women's prison—and I spoke earlier about the rates of incarceration of Indigenous women increasing 50 per cent from the period 2000 to 2010. If we do not turn these trends around it is difficult to see—if not impossible to see—how we are going to make the other Closing the Gap targets in terms of health, in terms of education and in terms of employment if we do not have functional communities.

In the Prime Minister's Closing the Gap speech she referred to the need for there to be an availability of places in educational institutions, and the Leader of the Opposition said that yes, there needed to be places in those educational institutions for young people. But he went a step further: he said that there need to be places and those kids needed to turn up. I say that they are both right, but I go a step further: not only do they need to turn up, but they need to be functional—and I can give you a firsthand example of that. When I was Attorney-General, I was taken on a tour of Kununurra one evening by police officers in Western Australia. The first thing those police officers did was take me where there were Indigenous youths on the streets—some as young as seven, they pointed out to me. The police were obviously worried about that because of the welfare of the young people, but also from the point of view of what those bored young people may get up to on the street. The next thing they did was take me to their homes a few blocks away, and that provided the answer: drunkenness was rife, with all its associated ugly antisocial behaviour; the noise, the tension—quite frankly, the sense of bedlam—was profound. I am not a small person, but there is no way that I would have walked down those streets. In fact, it was distressing to see that those hardened police officers became quite emotional in advising me that the kids we saw in the streets had to wait until alcohol induced sleep had set in before venturing back through the streets to their homes. Yet those kids were expected to turn up at school the following day and be functional. Clearly, in the circumstances that I saw, that was going to be an impossibility.

There are a number of successful programs. Indeed, in Kununurra, I was able to fund a program that was a drop-in centre so kids, instead of being on the street, could drop into the centre; that is one of the advantages of being a minister. I returned 12 months later and saw the centre up and running. It was pointed out to me that the cost to government of the centre was some $200,000 a year. It was pointed out to me at the same time that the cost of the centre, with capacity for 50 kids to drop in, was the cost of incarcerating one Indigenous youth. That was an example of a successful program and there are obviously more sophisticated programs to prevent recidivism that require the intervention of social workers, employment experts and so forth.

There are a number of very successful programs around. As the member for Gippsland pointed out, the vital importance of those programs is that they are being developed in partnership with Indigenous communities. My fundamental point is this: there are many, many examples of very successful programs, but unless and until we make a specific target for Closing the Gap to reduce rates of victimisation—that is, people who are victims of crime—and rates of incarceration of Indigenous Australians, we have Buckley's of making the other Closing the Gap targets.

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