Kelly O'Dwyer (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is no doubt that in this place there is a very strong bipartisan aspiration for a better future for Indigenous Australians. This report is a very important contribution to our understanding of the current state of play. The concerning aspect of the report that is being debated today is how we have stood still on many indicators for Aboriginal Australians and, in some instances, how far we have gone backwards.

This report is focused on young people and their contact with the criminal justice system. I think it is very revealing to refer directly to the report, where it says:

Tragically, indigenous juveniles and young adults are more likely to be incarcerated today than at any other time since the release of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody final report in 1991.

It goes on to say:

This rise has occurred despite increased funding and the concern and efforts of community members, government officials, non-government organisations and the judiciary around Australia.

Specifically, the detention rate for Indigenous juveniles is 397 per 100,000 people, which is 28 times higher than the rate for non-Indigenous juveniles, which is only 14 per 100,000. The report goes on to say:

In 2007, Indigenous juveniles accounted for 59 percent of the total juvenile detention population.

This is very alarming indeed. It is very alarming to note just how significant this issue has become for young Indigenous Australians.

You can only consider this issue, however, when you look at the reasons behind it and the resultant behaviours. There is a picture that is painted by this report that these very high levels of incarceration reflect other problems—problems related to the breakdown in family relationships and the dysfunction of many family relationships, the lack of significant role models in Indigenous communities, the breakdown in social relationships within the community, health disadvantages and the terrible health statistics that belie the fact that we are a First World country. In fact, shockingly, the health statistics that are revealed indicate that we are on par with many Third World countries when we look to Indigenous health standards. There are issues of education and the fact that we have so many Indigenous Australians who are simply not attending school. There are also issues around housing, employment and economic opportunity.

There is much that is very worthy in the contributions made in this report but the fact remains that for nearly every government department that is involved with the Closing the Gap initiative that has been brought forward by this government there is very little data collection and coordination in the programs that are being put forward. The government is very focused on spending money but it is not particularly focused on the outcomes that are being delivered. It is my view that we must monitor very carefully and closely the outcomes of all programs and analyse the results so that successful programs can be expanded and those that are not successful can be modified or, in some cases, discontinued if they prove not to be worthy.

Noel Pearson, who is a very significant Indigenous leader, has for many, many years been critical in this debate about achieving better outcomes for Indigenous Australians, not only by identifying the problems, but by thinking in a very innovative way about some of the solutions. In doing so, he has challenged the philosophical orthodoxy on which a lot of the programs and government solutions to date have been based. I want specifically to look at education and the school attendance rate for Indigenous children. We know, looking at the figures, that on average attendance is less than 60 per cent and in remote communities it reaches barely 50 per cent. These children are being left behind.

In particular, I turn to the recommendations that this report has made regarding school and community relationships. Recommendation 16—and I do not propose to read all of it—specifically focuses on the importance of flying an Aboriginal and/or a Torres Strait Islander flag alongside the Australian flag within school grounds; learning about Indigenous sites of significance in the local area; incorporating an acknowledgement of country at the start of significant events as well as school assemblies; using local Indigenous language names for school classrooms or sporting houses and teams; celebrating Mabo Day, NAIDOC Week, Reconciliation Week and Harmony Day—it goes on. But what it does not talk about specifically is increasing what are, in my view, core skills of numeracy and literacy and equipping students today with the skills they are going to need to be fully engaged in realising the economic opportunities that are available to them as members of the broader Australian community. I think that this is a significant problem. While the other recommendations I refer to may be very worthy, they are not going to make a significant difference to the educational experiences and outcomes for Indigenous Australians. I think we need to be a lot stronger. Parents need to send their children to school or face income penalties. We know already that many parents are not prosecuted when in fact they do not send their children to school.

Noel Pearson has talked about the success of a number of programs that have been developed in Cape York. He has talked in particular about educational scholarships for students to be educated, sometimes outside the community. The results with those programs and educational scholarships have been quite outstanding, and I think we need to very seriously consider whether this is something that the government should be looking very closely at.

Noel Pearson has also talked, significantly, about mutual obligation, about the culture of personal responsibility and about empowerment for the individual and for the community. I think these are the values that should be the touchstones that shape Indigenous policy now and into the future.

It is very clear that an integrated approach to Indigenous policy is required. We need to look carefully at the way in which schools and education policy interact with broader employment and economic policy and with the health initiatives that are being put forward as well as at the support we provide to families in Indigenous communities. We all want Indigenous children and Indigenous people in this country to be equipped to participate fully in the many opportunities a country like ours has to offer.

We in the coalition have been particularly strong on these issues. While we might not always have been perfect in the response that we provided, we have made and will continue to make the hard decisions, such as the Northern Territory intervention, to tackle problems that we know exist, such as alcohol abuse and gambling. We will also continue to provide support to parents to get children to school and work with families and communities to remove hurdles that prevent school attendance. It is incumbent upon us as members in this place to break the cycle of expectation that young Indigenous people end up in detention and jail. We need to do this by attacking the problems at their core. We must do this together and as a matter of urgency.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to take the opportunity today to also contribute, along with the member for Higgins and others who have spoken previously, to the debate on this particularly important report, of June 2011, of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs that has been presented to the parliament Doing time—time for doing: Indigenous youth in the criminal justice system. I indicate the tremendous work that has been done by the committee and acknowledge Shane Neumann as the chair and Sharman Stone as the deputy chair of that committee. I note that the member for Durack is also a member of the committee and is here to participate in this debate.

Some reports are presented before this parliament that, I believe, are of such significance to the nation that all of us should engage with the report. I believe this is one of those reports. This particular report tells a story of our nation. It is a difficult one to hear and it confronts us with some real challenges. Sadly, they are not new challenges. The foreword of the report indicates that, in fact, it is 20 years since the report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and, despite that report, over the time that has subsequently passed the incarceration rate of Indigenous Australians, including Indigenous youth, who are the subject of this report, has actually worsened. Sadly, Indigenous juveniles are 28 times more likely than non-Indigenous juveniles to be incarcerated, despite Indigenous peoples representing only 2.5 per cent of the Australian population. This is a state of affairs that I think requires the urgent attention of all governments, communities and people across this nation.

The report goes to great length and into great detail to outline the extensive social and economic disadvantage that contributes to the high levels of Indigenous contact with the criminal justice system. It is clear from the committee's investigation that there is intergenerational dysfunction in some Indigenous communities that presents a truly significant challenge of breaking that cycle of offending, recidivism and incarceration.

There is so much in this report that it would be difficult to encompass it all in a 15-minute contribution in this place. So I want to focus specifically on where we as a nation, sadly, sit in terms of these contacts and incarcerations. Secondly, I want to generally touch on some of those contributing factors and some of my own experiences in the field and then, finally, to talk about one local program in my area that I think is representative of the sorts of activities that can make a difference.

As I indicated, the final report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody came down in 1991. So this year, at the time of this report we are debating, we are 20 years down the track since that point in time. The committee drew together research and statistics gathered from state and national authorities. I want to indicate some of these to the House. I think they speak for themselves. Sometimes statistics can be a way of hiding the truth, as many have quoted the famous quote: 'Lies, damned lies and statistics.' However, I think in this case they actually illuminate for us very clearly the issue that we are dealing with.

The detention rate for Indigenous juveniles is 397, per 100,000. That is 28 times higher than the rate for non-Indigenous juveniles. In 2007 Indigenous juveniles accounted for 59 per cent of the total juvenile detention population, despite Indigenous people being 2.5 per cent of the total population. There is clearly a strong link between the disproportionate rate of juvenile detention and the disproportionate rate of adult imprisonment. Not surprisingly, if many of those adults being imprisoned are from Indigenous families then the flow-on impact on the children of those families sees an increase in their contact with the system and incarceration as well. At this time 25 per cent of all prisoners in Australia are Indigenous despite, as I said, being 2.5 per cent of the population.

Prison census data shows that between 2000 and 2010 the number of both Indigenous men and Indigenous women has increased markedly—Indigenous men by 55 per cent and Indigenous women by 47 per cent. When we comprehend how significant Indigenous women are to the fabric of Indigenous communities and to holding families together, from the increasing level of incarceration of those leaders in families and communities we can see why there are dysfunctional families with intergenerational problems and incarceration becoming a serious issue. Between 2000 and 2009 the imprisonment rate of Indigenous Australians increased 66 per cent. It is a really difficult statistic for us to get our heads around but, more importantly, it challenges us to say, 'This is something that we really need to seriously take on board to find strategies that work.'

Indigenous juveniles and young adults are much more likely to come into contact with police in comparison with their non-Indigenous counterparts. So the first point of contact is a place at which an important intervention can occur. In 2008 over 40 per cent of all Indigenous men in Australia reported having been formally charged with an offence by police before they reached the age of 25. That is 40 per cent of all Indigenous men.

Indigenous juveniles are overrepresented in both community and detention based supervision. Indigenous juveniles make up 53 per cent of all juveniles in detention and 39 per cent of all juveniles under community supervision. Importantly, they are younger than the average of those in the system. Twenty-two per cent of Indigenous juveniles in detention were aged 14 or younger, compared with only 14 per cent of non-Indigenous juveniles.

It should be also acknowledged—and the committee makes this important point—that the adverse contact with the criminal justice system for Indigenous people is not confined to their being offenders. It is also, sadly, the fact that they are more often than not victims of crime as well. In particular, they are more likely to be victims of violent crime than non-Indigenous people. The impact of that on communities is important to recognise.

Between 2006 and 2007 Indigenous women were 35 times more likely to be hospitalised as a result of spousal partner violence than non-Indigenous women. When we think of the impact of that on families and young people and the direct link between violence in families and engagement with the criminal justice system, we can see why there is such a problem. The committee acknowledged in its report that Indigenous victimisation rates are an important part of the problem that need to be addressed.

In 1991 the royal commission indicated in its report:

The more fundamental causes of over-representation of Aboriginal people in custody are not to be found in the criminal justice system but those factors which bring Aboriginal people into conflict with the criminal justice system in the first place ... [and] the most significant contributing factor is the disadvantaged and unequal position in which Aboriginal people find themselves in society - socially, economically and culturally.

Twenty years later that still stands the test of time.

The committee report goes into significant coverage of the particular aspects of disadvantage and overrepresentation of Indigenous juveniles among young offenders. They include the broad categories of social norms and individual family dysfunction, which I have touched on to some extent, and connection to community and culture. There are some very moving stories in the report which were told by Indigenous elders, who talk about their young generation being caught between two worlds. It is not that they are connected to one and not the other; it is not that they are connected to the traditional culture and are therefore not able to participate in modern society or that they are connected to modern society and have lost their traditional culture. Rather it is that they are lost between the two, which is the worst possible circumstance you could imagine for them.

The health implications are talked about in the report. In particular, it discusses the issues around drug and alcohol abuse. It not only discusses drug and alcohol abuse in the environments in which young people are present but also discusses abuse by young people themselves and the impact it has on bringing them into the justice system. The education issues are talked about—the challenges not only of keeping young people in general engaged but also and in particular the challenges of keeping Indigenous young people engaged, and the member for Higgins talked about some of those. The employment link is discussed—getting through education and getting a job is also an important indicator and more of a challenge for our Indigenous young people than it is for our non-Indigenous young people. Accommodation is also discussed—the challenges around providing safe and secure housing and a permanent and ongoing address and how significant that is for young people. I recommend that all members of our communities have a look at both those aspects of the report in some detail and the very important recommendations that are made in the report.

In the few minutes I have left, I will make some observations about a recommendation of the report which addresses police training and Indigenous employment. Included in recommendation 23 is a suggestion for, 'Incentives to increase the employment of Indigenous police men and women and opportunities for mentoring and police work experience for Indigenous students.' I think that would be a very worthwhile initiative. One of the saddest comments I ever heard when I worked for juvenile justice was from a young Indigenous man who was in detention. He was completing his schooling—he was 17—and was engaged in some volunteer work for local emergency services. He said that the worst thing in his life that he could imagine was being released from detention and being sent back to his family and community. He knew that that the dysfunction there was such that it would be very hard for him to resist falling back into the old ways that had got him into trouble in the first place; it would also mean that it would be unlikely that he could continue with either his education or his potential employment opportunities, which were occurring because of his engagement in volunteering activity. I thought that was this saddest thing that I had ever heard—that a young person could say to me with years of experience under his belt that he was better off in detention than he would have been in the community, and I think that that remains a challenge for us.

I want to acknowledge Project Murra in my own area of the Illawarra. This project is conducted through Warrigal Employment and began in 2008 as a partnership between the local commander of the police service in Lake Illawarra, the local TAFE and Warrigal employment. It is a particularly successful two-year program of school based traineeships with the police service which has now been extended to other emergency services and been done in conjunction with the HSC. It keeps young Indigenous people engaged in school and provides some real connections to the police and emergency services. It contributes to crime prevention because the community is connected to the police service. It also contributes to school retention and is an important employment strategy. The program has been going so well that the police service have continued with it and, indeed, it has been extended to other emergency services. The program has been supported and funded by the federal Department of Employment, Education and Workplace Relations and by New South Wales TAFEs as well as by the services. It is creating a much stronger relationship between those services and the local Indigenous community, and in the class of 2009 there were 12 students—three with the Wollongong police, three with Lake Illawarra police, two with Nowra police, three with the New South Wales ambulance service and one with the state emergency service. That is the current cohort, which is going through to completion now. Overall, it is a really good program which has multiple benefits: it is well regarded by the community, it is a great asset to the broader community and it increases the capacity for young people to be connected. I understand that one of the young people is at the police academy completing the degree, continuing their enrolment and engagement with the police service. That is a good local story, but a small one. We all need to be focused on doing far more to address the issues that have been raised in this very important report.

Barry Haase (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As a member of the committee reporting on this issue in our report entitled Doing time: a time for doing, it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to make a comment. This report was the result of almost two terms of government. We carried on with this inquiry as a new committee in this parliament. That gave us the opportunity to reflect on the wealth of knowledge that had been accumulated by the previous parliament and add to that with our own fortes and, to a degree, preconceptions. From a personal perspective, I had my first association—which is ongoing—with Indigenous Australians when I first started school. A substantial part of our rural community was Indigenous. In those years, their welfare had been dreadfully neglected. That was prior to 1967.

The conditions under which those Indigenous people lived were to say the least Third World. But there were a couple of remarkable things about that era for Indigenous people in agricultural Australia. Certainly I can speak with first hand knowledge of my Shackleton and Bruce Rock area. Firstly, all children attended school regularly. There was much less mobility of parents in those days. The second thing that is important to note is that the greatest majority of the male heads of households—and please do not pull me up for being sexist; in those days, it was the male of the household who went out to work and put bread on the table—were gainfully employed, receiving a weekly wage and providing for their families.

The shocking thing is to contrast that situation and the situation that exists as the norm today. In this place, we have been discussing sporting and other programs that are funded to encourage Indigenous male youth specifically to attend school on a regular basis. I am speaking about the Clontarf program, which is now spreading across Australia, having emerged from the Clontarf Aboriginal Hostel in Perth, Western Australia. There is no doubt that it is instructive for emerging families today that there will be a circle of experience as an Indigenous person growing up, maturing, having a family and passing on in today's Australian society. Sadly, that circle is generally welfare dependent. It involves youth with the judicial system, then corrective services, then welfare, then the judiciary and then corrective services. The statistics that have been gathered in this report, Doing time: a time for doing, clearly indicate that anything that we have done in the past has failed to address the issue of recalcitrant Indigenous youth moving through a revolving door system of welfare and incarceration.

Rational people could only conclude that anything that we have done in the past is something that we should avoid doing in the future and that we ought to use this report as a foundation of knowledge on which to build a different approach to the problem. And it is a problem. You cannot ignore the fact that Indigenous people represent 2.5 per cent of the Australian population and the statistic that, of incarcerated Australian youth, 53 per cent are Indigenous. That is a statistic that you cannot find anything but horrendous and unacceptable.

So what is the solution? We have made 40 recommendations, and I would be a liar if I were to stand here and suggest (a) that the 40 recommendations will be adopted and (b) that, should they be adopted, the problem would go away. It is irrational to suggest that. The problem has been entrenched for far too long. But there is no doubt in my mind that the major cause of the problem—that is, revolving door incarceration—is lack of education on the one hand and the present societal acceptance that education will not be absolutely necessary for Indigenous youth.

We need to change the mindset of the Australian people. Indigenous kids have every right to education, as much right as mainstream kids. There is no difference in their intellect and there ought to be no difference in their treatment, yet we excuse the lack of school attendance by Indigenous kids. We turn a blind eye. We speak to state governments about the employment of truancy officers to make sure that Aboriginal families know that their children are not attending school and that something must be done about it because the cultural expectation is that children will go to school, and state government education ministers say, 'Well, there's nothing we can do about it.'

I believe there is something we can do about it. We ought to tie welfare payments to school attendance. I further believe that to not do so, and therefore to excuse Indigenous families from the responsibility of making sure their children attend school, if you analyse it and extrapolate, is certainly a denial of the human rights of those children. It could almost be compared with genocide, because we are guilty as parliamentarians if we do not enact laws that create outcomes for Australian citizens. We are contributing to an ongoing sin, and that is the denial of Indigenous children's rights. Everyone has a right to an education in this country, but if you are Indigenous we do not insist that you attend an institution. If you are mainstream, we do. Parents who do not send their children to an educational institution are brought to account. But if you are an Indigenous parent there would appear to be very active ignorance. We do not even expect it.

I hear employees of Indigenous agencies say: 'Look, there's nothing we can do. They're just Indigenous people.' I think that is horrendous—totally unacceptable. There is no reason why we should not apply the same rigour in our requirements at law to Indigenous people as we do to mainstream society, and part of that requirement is to send kids to school. It is a parental responsibility and it is accepted generally at law that it is a parental responsibility—unless you are an Indigenous parent, it seems. Then we turn the blind eye.

We need to change that. We need to work on a policy and even, dare I say, ignore political correctness. We have already done so much damage to the Indigenous population, their expectations and their role as part of mainstream Australian society. We have already done so much damage. Well-intentioned decisions resulted in the denial of opportunity, because we denied our responsibility of insisting that Indigenous families maintain the same culture as mainstream families and accept education as the norm. I can tell my colleagues here in this place that school attendance in Indigenous remote communities is not the norm; it is far from the norm. And it is accepted by all and sundry as being okay, because, 'Well, the parents had to drive 2,000 kilometres to attend a funeral and they were going to go for a week but they stayed for three months, and that is okay because it is culturally appropriate.' I do not accept that children should be denied their human rights on the basis of our current interpretation of what is culturally correct.

There is a far greater need today for tough love: the application of rigour in Indigenous funding programs and a change in the commonly held attitude that we will fund an Indigenous program but not really expect high performance and positive outcomes, because it is an Indigenous program. It looks to me as though this is perhaps not the actual situation, but I can assure you that agency after agency will say, 'We have got a program. We have got a bucket of money and we are moving amongst Indigenous communities and we are looking for groups to take up this funding. So, would you, or you or you perhaps take this funding responsibility on and deliver for your community, because it is going to have a very positive outcome.' People are almost coerced, as Indigenous individuals, into participation in programs that have been well-meaningly funded by governments of all kind. But at the end of the day there is very little expectation, and almost no audit, that the outcomes achieved by that funding will be positive. After the expenditure of the funding somebody says, 'Well, that provided employment for a period of time and circulated taxpayer funding for a period of time and therefore it must have had a positive outcome.' Well, it is not the case. My experience clearly indicates that this effectively creates a privileged position for those who are directly involved in the particular program, but in the rest of the community it creates a degree of jealousy. Then, when everyone observes that the program has achieved no positive outcome, the rest of the community in the future is not reticent when putting their hand up for a government funded program, so that they, too, can be part of it. And because they believe there will be no requirement for rigour and no actual audit, and no-one will be criticised if there is no positive outcome.

We need tough love in our communities. We need to remove our focus on political correctness and we need to focus on the necessity of positive outcomes. If that requires us to follow the path proposed by Noel Pearson, I say 'Let's do it,' because everything we have done in the past of which Noel Pearson, amongst others, is extremely critical has been a collective failure. Look at just one area: education. The most educated, employable, capable and responsible Indigenous members of my community, the seat of Durack, are those who were educated under the mission system. We are all very quick to criticise the paternalism of the mission education system and how teaching with an iron rod is not acceptable these days, but the individuals who were educated at Mogumber, Moore River, Mount Margaret, Karalundi and numerous other missions under a rigorous system got a good education, and they attended school. There was direct connectivity between school attendance and learning, the expectation and the welfare that was provided by the mission.

Having believed that I would speak a few moments only on this, I find that there is just so much to say. In these closing seconds, let me implore my colleagues on both sides of the House: something needs to be done. The stats are all there. The knowledge has been collected. We know that what has happened in the past is not solving the problem. Fifty-three per cent of the juvenile prison population are Indigenous, although they make up just 2.5 per cent of the general population. The worst possible result of this report would be that we once again do nothing.

Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak today on the report tabled by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs entitled Doing time—time for doing: Indigenous youth in the criminal justice system. This topic makes my heart break. It is 20 years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, with its nearly 340 recommendations; but today, among Aboriginal communities, incarceration levels are even higher than they were then. In the words of Mick Gooda, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner:

… we've failed miserably in the last 20 years.

Indigenous juveniles between the ages of 10 and 17 and Indigenous young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 make up a disproportionate part of our prison population. In fact, Indigenous juveniles account for 59 per cent of the juvenile prison population. They are 28 times more likely to be imprisoned than their non-Indigenous counterparts. According to prison census data taken between 2000 and 2010, the number of Indigenous Australians in custody has gone up by 55 per cent for men and 47 per cent for women—this at a time when the Indigenous population of Australia is only 2½ per cent of the entire population. Quite clearly, this is not good enough.

This report makes clear that the level of contact between our Indigenous youth and our criminal justice system is unacceptable; it is too high and it needs dramatic and drastic action. The impact of having such a high number of Indigenous youth in our criminal justice system has implications that are far and wide: implications for the family unit, for the broader community and for levels of school attendance—which in remote communities are less than 50 per cent—and, personally, for their subsequent employment chances and for the likelihood of their escaping the negative influences of substance and narcotic abuse.

We need programs that tackle the root causes of offences by Indigenous juveniles. We need to get the kids more engaged. We need to work with families. We need to create employment opportunities. We need to end the substance and narcotic abuse. We need an integrated, intergovernmental approach.

In this report, there are over 40 recommendations—recommendations that talk about engaging and empowering Indigenous communities in the development and implementation of programs; how to better integrate and coordinate initiatives by government agencies, non-government agencies and community groups; the need to focus on early intervention; and the need to engage Indigenous leaders, particularly elders. Those 40 recommendations contain some very important suggestions, including better funding for local mentoring programs and improving recreational and sport related activities, because such programs will offer Indigenous youth a better life and a better lifestyle; more gender appropriate accommodation for Indigenous youth, particularly housing plans that ensure they are better equipped when they leave detention; better funding for programs to deal with substance and narcotic abuse; and greater focus on mental health programs. Interestingly, the report recommends hearing tests for all children starting in preschool and training of police so they are more aware that the young people they encounter may have hearing loss. It also recommends incentives for school attendance, including breakfast and lunch programs. If we can get them to school, we offer them an alternative lifestyle to one spent in the prison system. Another recommendation is for teacher development programs to enable our teachers to recognise poor health in their students and to have a greater cultural awareness. This will help them engage with students who may have poor English language skills.

We need more incentives for employers to take on Indigenous apprenticeships. Interestingly and importantly, we need to raise the profile of the Australian Defence Force and provide recruitment opportunities among Indigenous youth. Norforce is a good example for many Indigenous youth, with their communities playing a vital role in the protection of our nation. Increasing employment opportunities for Indigenous men and women in the police force is another recommendation. Then there is the recommendation to establish and fund a national Indigenous interpreter service.

The Australian Institute of Criminology needs to do a more detailed analysis of sentencing options and outcomes for Indigenous Youth. They need to look into the use of diversionary options to determine whether there are alternative sentencing options other than incarceration for Indigenous youth. Critically, we have to examine the rehabilitation process. This report suggests assigning community service case workers, providing better counselling for substance and alcohol abuse and engaging the families of those who find their way into our criminal justice system.

Noel Pearson has written about a speech that a young 15-year-old Aboriginal woman named Tania Major gave in front of John Howard in 2003. She was from the Cape York Peninsula. In this speech, she told her audience, including the then Prime Minister, that she was the only student in her primary school class who went on to be successful. She was the only girl not to have a child at the age of 15 or before. She was one of only three children in her class not to become an alcoholic. Seven of her classmates had been in prison. Four had tragically committed suicide. She went on to get an education, including a university degree, and forged a new path for herself. If we get more Indigenous youth to school, if we lift the year 12 retention rates from around the 35 per cent or 36 per cent that they are today, if we get systematic help for those Indigenous youth in our prison system then we can have more achieve as she has done. In this report, there is mention of a study conducted in New South Wales that found that 90 per cent of Indigenous juveniles in the prison system tested positive to drugs, a remarkable statistic. If we show them the way through education and if we intervene to stop this economic disadvantage then we have a chance.

In conclusion, we must do better. We need to be innovative. We need to focus, as Noel Pearson and others have talked about, on the issue of personal responsibility. But we cannot leave people behind if they cannot help themselves. If Australians want to know what the true moral challenge for our time is it is Indigenous disadvantage and particularly, as we have learned from this report, the disproportionate and tragic numbers of Indigenous youth who are incarcerated in our jails today.

Teresa Gambaro (Brisbane, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship and Settlement) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to speak to the report Doing time—time for doing. I congratulate and place on the record today my deepest esteem for my parliamentary colleagues on the House Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs who have produced this report, particularly the chair, the member for Blair, the deputy chair, the member for Murray, and all of the other committee members.

It is quite tragic to be standing here today as a long-time member of parliament talking about the same things we were talking about 15 or more years ago. It is a tragedy that we still have to have a report that has to delve into these particular issues of Indigenous youth in the criminal justice system in Australia. It highlights the appalling overrepresentation of Indigenous youth in detention right around this great country of ours. While Indigenous Australians make up only a very small percentage of the population—about 2.5 per cent—25 per cent of prisoners are Indigenous.

Various members before me have spoken about the report, about the 110 submissions that were received and about the very important 40 recommendations that were made to government. My colleagues found during the inquiry that a disproportionately high number of Indigenous young adults are caught up in the criminal justice system. It is an absolute travesty in this day and age that we have this major challenge confronting us here in this place and in communities all around Australia. Indigenous youth are 28 times more likely to offend and be incarcerated today than at any other time since the final report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was released in 1991. One of my assistants in Queensland at the time worked on that particular report. The devastating stories that she would tell me haunt me to this day. It was her role to assist the commissioner in obtaining evidence. It is sad that we are here 20 years later and we still have this incredible rise in Indigenous youth in detention despite the work of numerous government agencies, hundreds of community organisations, community elders and many other active volunteers.

I had a business life before I came into this place. I taught at a university. One of my saddest regrets when I was teaching students in the business school at the Queensland University of Technology was that I never encountered one student of Indigenous nationality. I would have Chinese students and African students. I would have students from every corner of the globe, but never once did I have the privilege of teaching a student from an Indigenous background. It is really sad when we look at the dropout rates. Many of the speakers today have spoken about the horrific dropout rates and nonattendance at school. There are people who are much more knowledgeable than I about this. One of our whips here, the member for Forrest, has a large Indigenous community. Earlier on we heard from Barry Haase, the member for Durack. He has a large number of Indigenous people in his electorate. We really need to do a lot more here. Education is where it really needs to start.

Just a year or so ago I had an important project in my own business. I had a retail seafood business, and I recognised some outstanding qualities in our assistant manager, who was of Indigenous background. I decided that I would work with her to be the best assistant manager that she could possibly be. But you have to take a holistic approach. There were issues of lack of good nutrition and work standards that we addressed. I think that was probably one of my greatest failings as an employer. While we worked very, very hard to get consistent attendance at work and we worked on some of the social aspects that were affecting her life as well as the nutritional aspects and also the lack of educational opportunities that she had had earlier, I am sad to say that I failed in my quest because it was beyond me. As much as one can help in all of those areas, there are some cultural issues that are stumbling blocks, and we need to address those. They are stopping business people from achieving their best potential. One of my greatest regrets is that we could not go any further there and I sincerely wish her the very best in whatever she endeavours to do in her life. But literacy was clearly an issue with my assistant manager. Whilst literacy issues are higher in Indigenous populations, they will not allow Indigenous people to go on to further education and to be skilled in the best possible way. We need to really work on that.

The report that we are talking about today deals with contact with the criminal justice system. It presents a whole range of problems for Indigenous youth in Australia. The report highlights the sad fact that Indigenous kids are more likely to come into contact with the police and the criminal justice system than non-Indigenous kids. Once you get into that terrible cycle it is hard to break, and it is a self-fulfilling cycle. The report identified a link between the overrepresentation of Indigenous youth in the criminal justice system and social factors. We have to look at these much more seriously. We have to look at educational levels, as I mentioned just earlier. We have to look at levels of alcohol and drug use, hearing loss and all of those self-esteem issues as well. The combination of all of those things in Indigenous youth has led to the outcome of this particular report.

The report also recommended a host of activities designed to address these problems and to reduce the level of incarceration. I note particularly that there is a lack of a holistic approach. Just as I tried to take a holistic approach in my workplace, I think we need to do that. We need to have better pathways for Indigenous people out there in the community. We have to take an absolutely holistic approach if we are to address these issues. The 40 recommendations outline a very clear strategy for improving positive social norms. They look at things like improving education and addressing employment, health issues and housing. The report also outlined the need for improvement in government policy on police education and training. We need to have more Indigenous police officers. I welcome the fact that state governments have increased the number of Indigenous officers, and we in Queensland have led the way there as well.

Indigenous kids aspire to the same things as their non-Indigenous counterparts. They want a good job. They want to feel great about themselves. They want to spend money on things that they see on TV, just like other kids, and they want to spend money on themselves. They get frustrated sometimes at not being able to attain these things by legitimately being employed and sometimes, sadly, they turn to offending. They see that as the only way to address these same aspirations that we all have.

Much has been written and much has been said. Many speakers before me have highlighted this tragedy and many, many millions of dollars have been spent to tackle the problem, and yet the rate of incarceration continues to rise. There appears to be a lot of short-term funding. I am not knocking some of the programs—they are very good programs—but sometimes they do not get to fully achieve their aims because they are such short-term programs.

The report also noted that there is a lack of clear targets and outcomes in programs aimed at reducing youth in detention. I want to take this opportunity to highlight one program that has very clear goals and aims. I want to commend Project 10%, which was launched last month in my electorate of Brisbane. Unfortunately, due to parliamentary commitments in Canberra I was not able to be there, but I really follow the project with interest. While Project 10% was officially launched last month, it is the result of many years of hard work and many dedicated volunteers. Project 10% is a campaign aimed at reducing Indigenous incarceration rates by 10 per cent per year. This project recently won the community partnership awards in the Queensland reconciliation awards. I congratulate them wholeheartedly on this wonderful achievement. I want to thank everyone who is involved in that program. Project 10% was sponsored by McCullough Robertson solicitors and is a collaboration between ANTaR Queensland, Murri Watch and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women's Legal and Advocacy Service, ATSIWLAS. It is a community based project, has clear goals and is served by a group of amazing and willing volunteers. I applaud the work of Project 10%.

I commend this report and its recommendations. It highlights that an incredible amount of work needs to be done in the areas of health, education, the intervention and housing, but it also highlights that we need to really try to reverse the terrible scenario of Indigenous incarceration in our legal system. I thank the committee for their very thorough and dedicated work on this report. I commend the report.

Debate adjourned.