Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak of an issue of the utmost importance. Yesterday I had the pleasure of co-hosting the launch of a report from the Change the Record Coalition, Blueprint for change: changing the record on the disproportionate imprisonment rates, and rates of violence experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I seek leave to table a copy of that report.

Leave granted.

The Change the Record Coalition is a group of leading Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups, human rights groups and legal and community organisations, and they are calling for urgent and coordinated national actions to close the gap in imprisonment rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and cut the disproportionate rate of violence experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, particularly women and children.

We desperately need the actions that are recommended in this report. One of the points that was made both in the report and at the launch yesterday, by Kirstie Parker, one of the co-chairs of the coalition, was that, when the royal commission in 1991 handed down its report on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were seven times more likely to be incarcerated than non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, but we have gone backwards and now it is 13 times more likely that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people will be incarcerated than non-Aboriginal Australians. In the past 10 years we have seen an 88 per cent increase in the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in prison. And Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are 34 times more likely than non-Aboriginal women to be hospitalised as a result of family violence. This costs socially, of course, but also economically, and it is vital that we take a different approach.

That is why this blueprint is so important. It makes a number of recommendations and talks about a number of strategies. Very importantly, the Change the Record Coalition call for a whole-of-government approach, via COAG, to this issue. They talk about justice targets and an independent central agency to help coordinate work and a legislative approach. We need different policies to the approach that we have been taking. They are calling for an urgent and coordinated national action to close the gap in imprisonment rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

The report talks about the importance of justice targets. We are at that spot again, talking about justice targets. The Change the Record Coalition's targets are to close the gap in the rates of imprisonment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples by 2040 but to halve the rate by 2030 and to cut the disproportionate rates of violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to at least the same as the rest of Australia by 2040, with priority strategies for women and children.

They talk very clearly in the report about the need for a human rights based approach to resources and capacity building for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues. They talk about the four key principles that should underpin any action: self-determination, respect, culture and identity. Then they map out 12 policy principles that need to be addressed, including justice reinvestment, which talks about investing in community, not in prisons, and the need to support local communities, addressing the driving forces behind imprisonment and making sure that there are suitable services, intensive family support, early intervention and, very importantly, community controlled organisations and community decision making. They talk about services, not sentences; they talk about community orientated policing, smarter sentencing and not mandatory sentencing—which is one of the reasons for such an escalating incarceration rate. They talk about community justice and addressing the issues around young people in prison. These issues urgently need to be addressed.

I would go so far as to say that many people will have heard a lot of this before, but it has been brought together in this report by such a powerful group of organisations getting together to say 'this has to stop; we need to change the record. Government, please listen to this. Engage with the discussion around justice targets. I know this place is keen on a multiparty approach to this issue, so please read this report and let us together change the record.