Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

Rates of incarceration are still too high. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are over-represented at every point in the justice system. So I thank Senator Thorpe for bringing the motion before the chamber today and I thank the other speakers who have contributed to the debate so far. We still have a lot of work to do to address that over-representation and, in particular, to help the young people who are affected in so many ways by the disadvantage that still afflicts so many Aboriginal communities. As the Prime Minister has said, by any standard the status quo is not working. We cannot keep doing the same thing expecting a different outcome. All levels of government will need to do better if we are to make progress.

At the heart of the national agreement underwriting closing the gap, there is a simple principle: the key to practical and sustainable change is ensuring that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are involved and empowered in the design and delivery of policies, programs and services that affect their lives, their families and their communities. We are determined to work with the Coalition of Peaks on structural changes to the way that governments work with communities—formal partnerships and shared decision-making, building the community-controlled sector, transforming government organisations so they work for everyone and sharing access to data and information so that we can work together to make the right decisions together and act on the evidence that's before us. If we can get these fundamental reforms right, we can make progress on the targets.

Now, the targets, as everyone here completely understands, reach across health, education, economic development, housing, infrastructure and justice, and we can't untangle the unacceptable rates of incarceration from these other measures and these other metrics. We also can't untangle them from the systems which are principally controlled by state and territory governments, including many of those systems associated with justice and policing. It's why colleagues are interested in speaking about justice reinvestment approaches, and it's why the government is interested in funding them and supporting them. They offer us the opportunity to provide an integrated response to the challenges faced by communities and to work with communities to identify how those responses should be organised and delivered. Justice reinvestment empowers First Nations communities and leaders to develop local solutions that divert people who are at risk away from the criminal justice system and, more importantly perhaps, provide the social and community underpinnings that support people to have happy, engaged, prosperous lives.

That's why the government has committed a historic $91.5 million to enable these community led approaches. We've named some of the first recipients in places where we seek to work: in Cowra, in Maningrida, in Groote Eylandt, in Central Australia, in Cherbourg, in Yarrabah, in Townsville, in Derby, in Balgo and, of course, in Halls Creek and in Alice Springs. It is the largest justice reinvestment commitment ever developed by the Commonwealth government. These approaches had been attempted elsewhere in a period when the Commonwealth government was not interested in engaging, and these programs are showing that they can work.

In my own home state, the Maranguka Justice Reinvestment Project in Bourke has been an incredibly important project, initiated and run by local people. Bourke has 3,000 residents, 20 per cent of whom identify as Aboriginal. In 2013, elders in the community decided that a new way of thinking and doing things was required. They initiated this project, designed to better coordinate support for families and kids and to operate as a community hub that is community led and can work in partnership with state governments and non-government agencies. The overarching goal is to decrease the rate of contact First Nations children and young people have with the criminal justice system. It works within the pillars of cultural authority, collaborative and flexible service delivery, shared decision-making, brokering of social solutions to systemic challenges and operationalising of First Nations data sovereignty, and it has had an impact—a 39 per cent reduction in the number of juveniles charged in the top five offence categories. We are committed to building on the successes that have been demonstrated— (Time expired)