Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Children right across this country are being locked up in prisons and detention centres, despite all the evidence that shows that children's brains aren't in fact fully developed to form any type of criminal intent. The evidence shows also that throwing children into prison does nothing except put them on a pathway to spend more time behind bars as they get older. The research that I've done in this area is about the school-to-prison pipeline that we have built in this country.

We all know that this disproportionately impacts First Nations children. In 2022, on average, there were approximately 818 young people in detention on any one night. Seventy-eight per cent of those were unsentenced or on remand. That means that they have not been found guilty in a court of law. Fifty-six per cent of these kids are First Nations, despite First Nations kids making up just six per cent of the population between the ages of 10 and 17. My home state of Western Australia, shamefully, has the highest rate of First Nations children in detention, at 278.1 per 10,000 people, compared to just 9.4 per 10,000 for non-First Nations children. In the Northern Territory, the rate of First Nations people aged between 10 and 17 in detention was more than 30 times as high as for non-First Nations children: 232.1 per 10,000 and 6.6 per 10,000 respectively. This is increasing in every jurisdiction across Australia bar the ACT.

This year, the ACT Greens-Labor government passed a bill that would incrementally raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14 years. This is a small change that advocates have been calling for for years, and this will in fact bring the ACT in line with the recommendations from the Committee on the Rights of the Child, which recommended that all countries increase the minimum age for criminal responsibility to 14. I want to be really clear that this is a good move, and I commend the ACT government for taking this very overdue step. However, this is low-hanging fruit. This is, in fact, one of the easiest moves that governments right across this country can make. Of the 818 children that are in detention on an average night, 44 are aged between 10 and 13 years old. Whilst we absolutely need to raise the age of criminal responsibility because it's the right thing to do and in line with the neurological evidence, we also must aim higher. There is still a lot more that must be done, as we are still seeing kids aged 14 and older locked up if they are not rehabilitated. They come out more traumatised and more likely to reoffend.

Australia has one of the highest reoffending rates in the world. More than 60 per cent of the entire prison population have been previously incarcerated, and our system simply is not working. Yet we keep seeing the major parties take a tough-on-crime approach because it's electorally popular, but in fact it does not work, and we all know this in this place. These are kids. That's exactly what they are: they are kids. They are children. I think some correctional ministers in this country, specifically in my home state of Western Australia, need to be reminded of that. They are not 'cohorts'. They are not 'cases'. They are kids, and these kids are being put in appalling conditions. They are locked in cells for hours on end, they are sleeping on all fours because they are restrained, and there are unacceptable levels of self-harm and suicide attempts.

Over the past two years, there have been 500 instances of children attempting to take their own lives or, in fact, of self-harm. The WA Supreme Court ruled in July this year that kids at Banksia Hill, in Unit 18 are subjected to unlawful confinement on a frequent basis. Not only are these treatments morally wrong but they are found to be legally wrong as well. Justice Paul Tottle said in his judgement:

It has the capacity to cause immeasurable and lasting damage to an already psychologically vulnerable group.

And yet the government in Western Australia, shamefully, continues these practices that the Supreme Court has ruled to be unlawful. In Townsville's Cleveland Youth Detention Centre, these kids are locked in solitary confinement for weeks at a time, with judges and youth workers saying that children leave the centre scarred, angry and in fact more likely to reoffend. So we must ask ourselves: what exactly are we trying to achieve here? Do governments want to ensure that there will always be a cohort to lock up? Is that the question in the front of our minds?

Recently in WA, we saw the tragic and preventable death of a 16-year-old young man named Cleveland Dodd, who was held on remand and took his own life. He was the first child to die in WA prisons. Cleveland told security on more than one occasion that he was going to do this, and officers were allegedly asleep when calls were first made. Other officers were not issued with radios to even call code red during the time of finding him. There are so many places where this went wrong in the system, and, ultimately, a child lost their life. I want to take this opportunity to publicly state my heartbreak for Cleveland's family and community, and send my love to them. I'm so sorry that this has happened to you and your family, and I'm so sorry that this system has failed you.

We need to take a different approach, because our children's lives are at stake. The federal government does have a role. It has the responsibility to step in and coordinate a justice reform strategy to ensure that we don't see another preventable tragedy like this happen again. It should never have happened in the first place. This justice reform strategy must include raising the age. But, as I have said, it's much bigger than that. The reform needs to ensure that across Australia we have justice systems that respect human rights and the humanity of detainees and, most importantly, actually address the complex trauma and needs that so many of these kids have.

Most people, especially kids, don't wake up one day and decide that they are going to go out and commit crime. There is so much at play that leads to people committing crimes. Justice reform isn't just about having some programs in prison. It's stopping people from actually getting there in the first place. It is about having affordable housing for people, accessible health care, employment programs, mental health support, keeping our kids in school and drug and alcohol programs. I could go on and on, but we all know that we want better outcomes; I think that is shared across this chamber.

We need to have diversionary programs set up right across this country. For example: when a 15-year-old First Nations kid commits an offence and is to go before a court, the judge could have the legislative authority to refer that child to a divisionary program where they can connect back to their culture, have counselling and get back on track. And this, in fact, works. It's been proven to work. It lowers rates of reoffending and steps in before these kids are actually locked up.

We also need to use the billions of dollars that are spent on prisons and detention centres currently in these programs and to shift the power and the decision-making back into some of those First Nations communities. Those communities can then determine what some of those improved outcomes are for them and take a holistic approach to this. It would be based on evidence but also done in a culturally safe way. This may look different for each community, but its core elements are about early intervention and prevention.

As I've said many times in this place, the federal government controls the purse strings and has an oversight role. It's no longer acceptable for this government to wash its hands of the abhorrent treatment that children are currently being subjected to. There are wall-to-wall Labor governments in this country, particularly on the mainland. Now is the prime time for us to step up and make some real progress. It's time to show some leadership, take some action and actually stop our children from being harmed—and especially keep them out of lock-ups, prisons and detention centres.