Kerrynne Liddle (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The last project I worked on directly before being elected to the Senate was to put in place a custody notification service in South Australia for the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement, ALRM. The custody notification service, CNS, provides round-the-clock support to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people taken into custody by the police. The service required police to notify ALRM as soon as practicable after arrest that they had an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person in custody. The benefits were to assist police in discharging their duty of care and in reducing risk for everyone. The service facilitated communication between the arrested person and ALRM, which provided an holistic wellbeing check and, basically, got advice and communication with police for those who were held with or without charge. It was a simple step in reducing preventable deaths in custody and related harm.

One of the saddest stories I've heard was from the NT a few years ago, when a woman was taken into custody after police responded to a domestic and family violence report; a baby, left behind, died. The CNS discloses issues related to medication and/or mental health issues, or personal issues that might create risk for a person held in custody and/or others. It was funded by the coalition while in government, and the NIAA website advises that an evaluation to determine the effectiveness of CNS is underway to identify the gaps and opportunities for improvement. It has been that way since September 2022, and I very much look forward to finding out what the future of CNS is.

I want to talk about the fastest-growing cohort of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in custody: it's women. Although Indigenous Australians make up 3.2 per cent of the general population, they make up around 32 per cent of all prisoners. The Australian Law Reform Commission suggests that the rate at which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are imprisoned is a reflection of the multiple and layered nature of disadvantage they face—they are the links between entrenched disadvantage, including social, cultural and economic forms, and increased rates of criminal justice contact. These are well established and must also be tackled.

This is the reason why I argue so strongly for improving expectations, performance and accountability of service provision everywhere, because improving these outcomes will provide the foundations for people to build their own lives and their own futures. Where these fail to deliver as they should, the people who rely on them struggle. The Law Reform Commission provides evidence that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are frequent victims of crime, particularly interpersonal or violent crime. Female Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners are likely to have been victims of crime themselves, particularly family violence and sexual abuse.

When I was in Alice Springs recently, I went to visit the Alternative to Custody Life Skills Camp run by the Drug and Alcohol Services Australia organisation. There I met a number of women—young women, mothers—who were behind a high fence and wearing ankle bracelets, and who generously and confidently shared their stories, hopes and desires for building a better and different future on release. They explained how their decision to participate in the alternative to custody program enabled them to live in a 10-unit complex, learning cooking skills, literacy and numeracy and getting relevant support from counsellors. It's a six-month program, a community model to address behaviour, and it recognises cultural and individual needs and values. Women can self-refer or they can come directly from custody.

The women shared that their greatest fear on leaving custody was finding housing that would support them to maintain a stable home from which to anchor and rebuild their lives and the lives of their families. They were also concerned about remaining safe and free from the of domestic and family violence. While addressing deaths in custody is important, it is equally important to focus on prevention. That means children going to school, the expectation of parents to send those children to school, teachers who are focused on high expectations for those children because they turn up to learn and opportunity for reward and training in a job when they finish learning, to ensure they are on a much more positive life trajectory. It's quite simply not complex and it's not too much to ask us.