Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) recognises that:

(a) Australia's incarceration rate has now risen to 0.22 percent, the highest level since Federation;

(b) rates of homicide, robbery, car theft and assaults have fallen considerably since the mid-1980s, while the imprisonment rate has more than doubled;

(c) the direct cost of prisons is almost $5 billion per year; and

(d) there is a significant indirect cost of prisons, including the impact on the 77,000 children who have an incarcerated parent, adverse effects on the physical and mental wellbeing of inmates, and high rates of homelessness and joblessness among ex-prisoners;

(2) acknowledges that:

(a) the Indigenous incarceration rate is now 2.5 percent, the highest level on record;

(b) the Indigenous incarceration rate is now over twice as high as when the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody report was delivered;

(c) among Indigenous men born in the 1970s, 23 percent have spent time in prison;

(d) the Indigenous incarceration rate exceeds the incarceration rate among African-Americans; and

(e) Noel Pearson has described Indigenous Australians as 'the most incarcerated people on earth';

(3) notes that in:

(a) the United States (US), a bipartisan reform coalition at the state level has led to a substantial reduction in that nation's imprisonment rate over the past decade, with conservative groups such as Right on Crime joining with centrist reformers such as the Pew Charitable Trust's Public Safety and Performance Project to reduce incarceration in states such as Alabama, Texas and South Carolina; and

(b) 2018, President Trump signed the 'First Step Act', which reduces the US federal prison population by expanding compassionate release and increasing credits for good behaviour; and

(4) calls on the Government to:

(a) work with the states and territories to adopt justice targets under the Closing the Gap framework, so that the inequality in justice outcomes can be properly highlighted and to address unacceptable levels of incarceration among First Nations peoples;

(b) require the Australian Institute of Criminology to project levels of incarceration (and fiscal costs) in 10 years' time in the absence of meaningful policy reform; and

(c) engage states and territories in an data-driven conversation—drawing together victims' rights groups, prosecutors, and criminal justice experts—to identify the policies that are most effective to reduce crime and imprisonment.

Prison has an important role to play in incapacitating those who might do the community harm, in deterring those who might contemplate doing the wrong thing and in rehabilitating those who have done the wrong thing. But, in an era in which crime is falling, in which you are half as likely to be a victim of murder as you were in the 1980s, in which robbery rates and motor vehicle thefts are down, Australia is building a lot more prisons. Prisons are expensive and prisoners are expensive. States are currently scheduled to spend billions of dollars constructing new prisons, and housing every prisoner costs over $300 a day. That is more than the cost of a five-star hotel room in a big city.

Since 1985, the incarceration rate in Australia has risen from 96 prisoners per 100,000 adults to 221 prisoners per 100,000 adults in 2018. Among Indigenous Australians, the incarceration rate has risen from one per cent in 1990 to 2.5 per cent today. In Western Australia, the incarceration rate exceeds four per cent of adults, meaning that more than one in 25 Indigenous Western Australian adults are currently behind bars. That's only a snapshot at a particular point in time. If you look at Indigenous men of my generation, a quarter will spend time in jail. Recently the Indigenous incarceration rate exceeded the African American incarceration rate for the first time, leading Noel Pearson to describe Indigenous Australians as the most incarcerated people on earth. That's why Labor supports an additional Closing the Gap target of incarceration.

As they go to bed tonight, 77,000 Australian children will be without a parent because 77,000 Australian children have a parent behind bars. Those children are more likely to suffer mental health problems, are more likely to experience behavioural problems at school and are more likely to themselves engage in crime and be incarcerated. There is an intergenerational cycle that comes with incarceration. We know that around half of those who are incarcerated will be homeless upon release, that eight per cent say that they shared needles while in jail and that 11 per cent say that they were attacked by another prisoner while in jail.

There is another approach to ever-increasing incarceration in the face of declining crime rates. Ironically, Australia can learn from the most incarcerated country on earth—the United States. Since 2007, the US incarceration rate has fallen 11 per cent. Some 35 states have reformed criminal justice policies through justice reinvestment, working with bodies such as the Pew Public Safety Performance Project and the Council on Criminal Justice. These are Republican states and Democrat states. They include Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky and Texas. The reforms include reclassifying and redefining drug offences, revising mandatory minimums, establishing parole board member qualifications, improving electronic monitoring, capping revocation time, piloting specialty courts, requiring fiscal impact statements on expenditure on prisons, improving data collection, and establishing an oversight council.

I commend the reformers in the United States, including Republican Jerry Madden from Right on Crime, for their willingness to discuss with Australians the lessons of that country's system. Last week the Ninth International Criminal Justice Conference was held in Melbourne. It included Adam Gelb, the President and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice in the United States, speaking about the lessons that can be learnt from a country that has sought to make its streets safer and reduce expenditure on incarceration. In Australia I pay tribute to David Robertson, John Paget, Rick Sarre, Andrew Bushnell, Arie Freiberg, Mark Finnane and Adam Graycar, among many others, who have worked tirelessly to ensure that we have evidence based criminal justice policy.

This is not about being soft on crime. This is about being smart on crime, reducing the amount of taxpayer dollars spent on incarceration, and increasing the effectiveness of our criminal justice policy. There is no reason why Australia cannot have safer streets and closed prisons while saving taxpayers resources and at the same time improving the wellbeing of those who would otherwise be incarcerated.

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

Is the motion seconded?

Ged Kearney (Cooper, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Skills) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Ged Kearney (Cooper, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Skills) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Let me begin by making the most important acknowledgment of all, and that is that I speak to you on Aboriginal land. I pay respects to elders past, present and emerging, and speak to you with humility on these lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people: a proud people, who have survived all challenges over the decades and have prospered. This land is stolen and was never ceded.

I want to thank the member for Fenner for his incredibly important work on the subject of Indigenous incarceration. I also want to acknowledge the member for Barton and Senators Dodson and McCarthy. In our First Nations voices, solutions lie. I am committed to listening to their voices, because in their voices we will find the answers. I speak with humility on this topic because I cannot pretend to know the indignity and the suffering that First Nations peoples have endured since the colonisation of this ancient land.

Colonisation brought the arrival of disease, the expulsion of peoples from their traditional lands and the separation of children from their parents. The loss of identity and the marginalisation of entire communities decimated our First Peoples. This is what Prime Minister Keating acknowledged when he spoke at Redfern in 1992 and declared that the starting point must be:

… to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.

It begins, I think, with that act of recognition.

Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing.

A year before Keating gave the speech, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody recommendations were released, a seminal report which my friend Senator Dodson worked on. It's been 28 years since this report was released, yet the vicious circle that drives overrepresentation of Indigenous Australians in our justice system continues. There have been over 400 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody since the 1991 royal commission. Among Indigenous men born in the 1970s, almost one in four has spent time in prison. Nine-tenths of Indigenous men from WA born in the late 1970s have been arrested, charged or summonsed by police. An Indigenous man is 15 times more likely to be imprisoned than a non-Indigenous man. An Indigenous woman is 21 times more likely to be in custody than a non-Indigenous woman. An Indigenous child is 25 times more likely to be in detention. Those statistics should horrify every single person that hears them.

Just weeks ago, Kumanjayi Walker, an Aboriginal boy, was killed, and a police officer has been charged with his murder. Nine papers reported: 'No emergency or even general health facilities were available that night in the town.' This should sting every one of us. It should make us sit up and pay attention. It's a story that too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities face with their interaction with the justice system, and too often this interaction ends tragically.

Nowhere is the story of unfairness and diminished opportunity more clearly defined than in the justice gap experienced by First Nations peoples. It is unacceptable. For too long our justice system has failed First Nations peoples. As parliamentarians, I think we sometimes struggle to know how to fix it, but we actually have a very good guide to how we reduce Indigenous incarceration. In 2018 the Australian Law Reform Commission produced the Pathways to justice report. The ALRC made 35 recommendations towards systemic reform of how the justice system deals with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Their findings came from 11 months of research, 149 consultations and more than 120 submissions. This government, a third-term government, has not yet responded to it. It's not acceptable to ignore this issue.

In tackling the entrenched disadvantage faced by First Nations people in the justice system, we must be guided by those who live the reality of the justice gap, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their community-controlled and representative organisations. I have had the honour of meeting a number of times with the organisation Change the Record, which includes the wonderful young Jessica Peters, an Aboriginal woman who has experienced the justice system firsthand. They are part of the solution. Change the Record are demanding that we do not let another generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people lose their futures, their dignity and, for some, their lives because of inaction by the Australian government.

My seat, Cooper, which is on the lands of the Wurundjeri people, is named after William Cooper, the trailblazing activist who spent his lifetime working to advance Aboriginal rights. In 1935 William Cooper wrote to the King, asking that the Aboriginal people be given a voice. Today, almost 85 years later, we're still fighting to achieve that. We need constitutional recognition, enshrining in it a voice to parliament. We need to keep the process of reconciliation alive. And we need makarrata, a treaty and truth-telling and healing, because, until our communities can reconcile a joint narrative about the history of this country, we cannot be truly reconciled.

Anne Stanley (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support this motion. I would also like to acknowledge the member for Fenner for his extensive work in this area. His words today and over past years have reflected his commitment to accurate research, policy development and social justice for all Australians—in particular, our First Australians. As has been pointed out, incarceration in Australia is one of our biggest social challenges. It has become such an issue. It is a costly exercise for governments, both in the direct cost of incarcerating Australians and the indirect and associated social issues that arise. We often look at the United States and recognise it as the home of incarceration. For too long, African Americans have made up a disproportionate number of inmates across the United States, and they still do today. Here in our own country, the proportion of incarcerated First Australians outweighs that. There is a higher rate of First Australians in our corrective systems than there is of African Americans in the United States corrections system. We must now look to those states of the United States that have led reform in this area and use their examples to reduce the financial and social toll that this incarceration takes.

These reforms are not partisan policies. In fact, it was only last year that we saw the First Step Act, which allowed the compassionate release of imprisoned Americans and credits given towards their total time of incarceration for good behaviour. The act also allows for judges to ease mandatory minimum sentences and restricts practices that oversentence offenders, like stacking multiple weapons offences. These are not groundbreaking reforms, but the United States has had an issue with overincarceration and prison crowding for decades. Australia must now have a national conversation about both of these things. It must look inward and outward. We must look inward to our key issue: that our First Australians are more likely than nearly any other demographic in the world to be incarcerated. We must look outward to programs that have been embraced, most notably the First Step Act in the United States.

The rate of incarceration of First Australians is deplorable and unacceptable. Since 1990, the rate of incarceration of First Australians has more than doubled. One in four incarcerated adults in Australia is a First Australian. This means that First Australians are more likely to be incarcerated than African Americans. The research has found that, since 1985, the share of women prisoners has nearly doubled, the share of Indigenous prisoners has nearly tripled and the average age of prisoners has increased by seven years. What this research has done is provide us with a chance to analyse data and identify solutions. What must be done now is to appreciate the extensive work that the member for Fenner has done in this area and develop appropriate policies across all levels of government to stem the issues. Significant change in our prisoner population is at the extreme end of the scale. It's no accident that punitive policies and laws are sending more of our most vulnerable and disadvantaged Australians to jail and for longer. While white settlement of our nation was against somewhat of a convict background, I doubt that, a little over 200 years on, Australians want us heading towards another spate of incarcerations.

This issue does not call for softer sentencing. It does not mean we should release prisoners earlier. It does not call for alleviated sentences based on gender or on the racial or cultural background of a person. As the member for Fenner has said, it calls for a national approach to a criminal justice system. We need to face these issues head on. We need to work with our states and territories for logical and rational criminal justice policies that do not revert to the modus operandi of incarceration. We need to look at underlying social issues that cause our most vulnerable and disadvantaged Australians to be so unacceptably overrepresented in our jails. At the top level, we're talking about education, wider and easier access to mental health support, and alternatives to incarceration that do not involve the full-time jailing of offenders—alternatives like justice reinvestment in New South Wales, which was discussed earlier by the honourable member, which localises early intervention, prevention and diversionary solutions that can help reduce crime, build local capacity and strengthen local communities.

I congratulate the member for Fenner again for his extensive work on this issue and for bringing this motion to the attention of the House. It has highlighted a problem in our society and in our policies that shows that we do need, as proposed, a combined and national approach to policy reform in this area.

Alicia Payne (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in support of the motion from the member for Fenner. I want to thank him for this motion and for the research that he's conducted on this very important issue. What the member for Fenner has revealed is the shameful reality of incarceration in Australia. In fact, he points to what he calls a second convict age in Australia, as we now incarcerate a greater share of the population than at any point since 1899. More Indigenous Australians are locked up than ever before, with a higher share of First Nations peoples locked up in Australia than the notoriously high number of African Americans in the USA. And these increases are not due to increasing crime rates; crime in Australia has actually decreased over the same period.

More work needs to be done at all levels of government to significantly reduce the number of First Nations people in jail. We need to know more about the future costs, both social and economic, of continuing to lock people up at record levels. We need to take part in a data-driven conversation to determine the best way to reduce crime and imprisonment in Australia. We know that once someone enters the criminal justice system the chances of them leading a happy and productive life decrease significantly, a dire cost for both the people and our nation.

Why do we lock up over 43,000 Australians every year, and why, when the average incarceration rate in Australia is 0.22 per cent, do we lock up First Nations people at a rate of 2.5 per cent, the highest level on record? It is shocking that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men remain twice as likely to be in jail than to go to university. This statistic is not new, but it is something that should disgust us all as Australians and we need to keep talking about it until we can address it.

Many First Nations people have a culturally ingrained mistrust of our law enforcement agencies, and even fear of them, born out of intergenerational trauma. As the member for Cooper said, I speak with humility on this issue as I have no claim to understand what that is like. When your peoples and communities have faced systemic mistreatment for over 200 years, it is understandable that this would be the case. The number of incarcerated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders supports this position.

This is something we need to recognise as policymakers. At a roundtable discussion on the issue of Indigenous incarceration, organised by Change the Record in September, a young mother spoke about the impact of incarceration on her life. After a very tough childhood she sought belonging in all the wrong places, ending up in jail at a young age and then into a cycle of disadvantage and isolation. While in prison, she came to understand that the decades of struggle that her family had faced had played a definite role in her imprisonment and would impact on her children too if she wasn't able to build a better life outside. I promise not to forget her story.

A key change she advocated for was increasing the age of criminal responsibility. Here in Australia that age is 10 years. The international average is 12 and the United Nations recommends the age of 14. Why is Australia condemning children to a life in and out of prison by expecting them to make decisions like adults from the age of 10 years old? First Nations people continue to die in jails, police stations and remand centres, despite the fact that we held a royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody in 1991. In the 28 years since the report was published the issue has gotten worse, with 424 deaths between 1991 and August this year, and in recent weeks we have seen the deaths of Kumanjayi Walker and Joyce Clarke. The problem is worse than ever and as Australians we should all be devastated by this.

The Aboriginal deaths in custody report was presented to the parliament by the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs the Hon. Robert Tickner, on 9 May 1991. He concluded his speech by saying:

It is not too late, however, for other deaths to be prevented. The Royal Commissioners have given us their insights, their advice and a clear direction for change.

The families of those who have died, and indeed all Australians, have a right to expect that governments at all levels and of all political persuasions will act together to ensure that change takes place.

It must be said that the 426 deaths—and continuing and counting—must lead us to conclude that governments at all levels and of all political persuasions have failed. Instead, we have spent the intervening years doubling the Indigenous prisoner population.

Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member. There being no further speakers, the debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next day of sitting.