Lidia Thorpe (Victoria, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I want to talk about what are you all obsessed with at the moment: youth crime. But youth crime is not what you make it out to be. It is a symptom of current systems not working. Trying to be tough on crime by treating children as criminals doesn't fix the problem. What you call youth detention centres are nothing but prisons where you lock up children as young as 10. If prisons worked, crime numbers would be going down. Locking people up is not preventive or rehabilitative. All it is is damaging. It is damaging to those locked up, damaging to their loved ones and damaging to whole communities, because no-one gets better in prison, especially not children.

To thrive, children need love, care and guidance. They need safety and stability in their lives. Children's pre-frontal cortexes are not yet fully developed. This is their personality centre, their idea of self, of who they are. As a child, it's easy to take on ideas that aren't yours and it's easy to make mistakes, especially if you don't have the support or guidance of a community around you. What you never mention is that many children who are incarcerated at a young age have been removed from their families. Many have been passed on from one foster family to the next, all too often experiencing violence or lack of care. Please tell me how a child is going to develop any sense of self-worth under those circumstances. Who can they turn to for love, care and guidance?

Instead of ensuring that they get the support they need, you lock them in prisons and brand them as criminals, separating them from families and friends. You take away their every chance to have a childhood. And guess what happens? Well, it turns out that being incarcerated in these formative years doesn't solve disadvantage but entrenches it. It drives recidivism, and it means children never stand a chance. They have their whole lives in front of them, yet they don't.

The media put out reactionary stories on the horrors of youth crime, putting fear into everyday people, creating this perceived need to be harsh on these children, trying to show 'strong leadership'. But, at the end of the day, evidence based solutions on how to actually address the root cause of these problems are being ignored. What is shown to work is community led diversionary programs. They don't exclude children from community. That inclusion into community is exactly what is needed. The real criminals are here—the government, locking children up. They're the criminals. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child states: 'The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.'

What we are seeing in this country, with the Labor government over here, is imprisonment of children as a first resort gaining more and more popularity, especially around election time. It takes away not just their childhood but also their future, leaving behind nothing but a trail of destruction for whole communities. So thanks, Labor government. Thanks for not looking after our children in this country.