Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mick Gooda was being extremely kind when he commented, 'We are heading in the right direction.' In a country where in 1875 Inspector Foelsche could speak of 'going out on nigger hunts' and in South Australia the Premier's policy in 1878 until 1910 was to shoot Indigenous Australians rather than to arrest them and try them, it is understandable that we have a long way to go. I certainly recognise some of the positive stories in this year's Closing the Gap report: Aboriginal health workers in northern Queensland with the Baby One Program, Jericka Mungatopi from the Tiwi Islands, Ryan D'Souza in Western Australia with his completion of certificate III in civil construction et cetera. There are certainly indications of individuals who are succeeding and, on some fronts, such as attendance at school, there are positive signs. However, overall, one must be alarmed at the failure to really make decisive progress. For all the apologies in the world, there needs to be, as the report indicated, a national commitment and a resolve across Indigenous, Pacific and mainstream programs.

I will go to some of the figures without reciting the whole document. There is the proportion of babies born to Indigenous mothers. The low birth rate has remained around 12 per cent over the period of 2003 to 2013. Regarding the situation over the long term, there have been improvements in the apparent retention rates of year 12, but with the unemployment situation, whilst there has been a decline nationally in employment for everyone, the decline for the Indigenous community has been disastrous.

Today I want to specifically concentrate on incarceration. The situation in this country is quite alarming: Indigenous Australians constituted 28 per cent of prisoners in the nation in 2015; 30 per cent of all incarcerated women in Australia were Aboriginals in 2010; 48 per cent of juveniles in custody are Indigenous; and 58.6 per cent is the percentage by which imprisonment rates increased for Aboriginal women between 2000 and 2010. In the Northern Territory we are seeing some of the realities as to why people are incarcerated, get a record and then face the obvious outcomes of incarceration with regard to mental health, isolation from community, health issues et cetera. In large parts of the Northern Territory you cannot locally get a driver's licence. Trainers are very scarce. The language tests are in a language which is not very available in the community. So we get into a situation where unlicensed people are driving uninsured and unregistered cars—the trifecta on court lists—and people do end up in jail.

There are mandatory sentences. We have a situation where legal representation is abysmal, and this government stands indicted with regard to the actual retraction of the right of representation. We read about this in the United States, where people are on capital charges and facing death because of very poor legal representation, with legal representatives sleeping in the courts, totally unable to handle their cases. This is happening in our country. We have a situation where there is no attempt to warn people or to basically understand that in many of these outgoing settlements the dangers of actual accidents et cetera are extremely minimal.

We also have a situation in the Northern Territory where the government is increasingly moving towards contributions from residents of very poor communities to keep programs going. The Northern Territory is an outcome of this. We have a situation where it is costing $100,000 to keep people in jail and yet the government thinks the solutions to the world's problems are to construct a 1,400-person prison in Darwin, to expedite the construction of the Alice Springs prison for 500, and to institute a work camp at Tennant Creek. There is no training and no rehabilitation.

Is it any wonder that on the national front we have these figures where, even compared to the internationally acknowledged problems of black Americans, the actual overall rate is alarming? The figures here show that in Western Australia, for instance, the rate of Indigenous incarceration is 3,700 per 100,000. In Australia as a whole it is 1,900 per 100,000. In the Northern Territory it is 843 per 100,000. That compares with, for instance, the United States overall rate of 716. New Zealand, on our door, is 192, and the United Kingdom is 148. So this is a situation where those rates are, by any international comparison, of grave concern.

We must face up to the interrelationship of these outcomes with other situations in this country. We have the issue of police behaviour. People are thrown into prison basically because of the use of the f-word or the c-word, and if you look at the rates in which people are convicted for those offences there is a very stark race difference with regard to the way those offences are utilised.

As I said, a lack of language skills is an issue: Aboriginal people are sentenced to jail without fully understanding the court processes. In this country, this multicultural society, we even have an interpreting service for a language spoken by approximately 200 people in New Caledonia, and yet we cannot ensure that Indigenous Australians have the same right in the court system.

Regarding reoffending, across Australia about 70 per cent of prisoners—Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal—are reoffenders and 38 per cent are back in prison in two years. With that actual first charging over minimal matters—often, as I say, in the areas of car offences, driving licences et cetera—we have to ask ourselves whether that is really of any value to the society in the long term.

Of course it is not only the very serious matter of the incarceration rates; it goes across a broad plethora of issues. School attendance rates, despite improvements, are still an alarming difference. The 33 per cent decline in infant mortality from 1998 to 2014 has not been balanced in real gains in life expectancy. In actual fact the gain for men was only 0.8 years from 2006 and for women only 0.1. We are not on track to close the gap by 2031.

Speaking of the incarceration rate and the very serious problems there, I refer to the document A brighter tomorrow by Amnesty International. This details the need for action on many fronts: take immediate steps to become a party to the Third Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child; ensure that ongoing funding is made available so that the managing and coordinating role played by the NATSILS can continue; work with state and territory governments to quantify the level of unmet legal need currently experienced by Indigenous young people and their families; immediately withdraw the reservation to article 37(c) on the Convention on the Rights of the Child; and ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture. All of these are matters that need to be dealt with in moving against this very serious problem.

The overall picture is indeed of some grave concern. In summary, we can each year come back and say that on one or two criteria there was a minimal gain, that there has been improvement, but overall it is extremely depressing. We know that some of the goals have had to be abandoned on the education front over this period of time. I certainly endorse the recognition that has been called for by the opposition but certainly on a broader front this does require, as we said, a national effort. In a society which has historically been very much at the forefront of marginalisation of First Nation peoples much remains to be done.

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