Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Fenner for bringing this motion on the floor today. I commend him for doing so. He's quite correct—this is not about going soft on crime. This is about looking at history and seeing that what has been done in the past has not worked. I speak from experience. I grew up in the township of Kempsey, which in the seventies was second only to Moree in Indigenous numbers. I went to school with a number of Indigenous children. It was very common during my formative years for those kids to have one, and sometimes both, of their parents in custody. It was just an everyday thing. They would speak of that in class or in the playground.

In my later years, as a police officer in Kempsey, overwhelmingly the arrests involved Indigenous people. In 1991 the royal commission came out with 339 recommendations, many of which have not been fulfilled. As a prosecutor in Redfern and the Downing Centre, again, I saw the revolving door of Indigenous people coming in and out. And, as a lawyer of 18 years, the usual question was not, 'What's going to happen to me?' but, 'How long will I get?' So what changes do we need to make? Because the past has not worked. We need a holistic approach. We need to break the cycle and recognise that punishment does not work.

We firstly need to take a holistic approach and identify why this has occurred—past trauma, dispossession, alcohol. My friend spoke about justice reinvestment. In Kempsey, we are commencing a pilot program of justice reinvestment. The member for Fenner also spoke about reducing statistics of crime. Well, in fact, in Kempsey, criminal incidents, violence and property offences have risen by 25 per cent in the last 24 months. Break and enters have increased by 46 per cent. Fraud has increased by 77 per cent. The community of Kempsey and the Indigenous community of Kempsey realised that something needed to change. There is a great appetite for community change. The justice reinvestment model is that change.

While still adopting the policing role, this also involves adopting a community role, where the Indigenous community have their own forum sentencing and their own circle sentencing. It involves recognising that there needs to be leadership within the community and the breaking of the welfare cycle. This has been recognised by Mark Morrison, the principal of Kempsey vocational college. You may have seen this college on the ABC recently. It takes those children who have been abandoned by the school system. Over the past years those kids have graduated with certificates in various courses, their HSC and training in retail. It's giving them a path and giving them a future, because of a vision that policing was not the be-all and end-all.

Whether it's an engagement of closing the gap or a mixture of justice reinvestment, we all need to be unified. There needs to be a bipartisan approach with all Indigenous communities to change the system. We need to make sure that the Indigenous are no longer overrepresented in the justice system. Yes, there is a place for punishment. There will always be a place for punishment. But when you have systems like in the Northern Territory—the three-strike rule—where somebody could go to jail for three years for stealing something for $6 or $7, there is something seriously wrong with the system. I again commend the member for Fenner for moving this motion, and I look forward to working together on this issue.

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