Page 2759 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 6 October 2021
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The report of the Inspector of Correctional Services report in this matter is that external scrutiny is needed and that sometimes it is appropriate to have international organisations, those from outside the system, come in and say, “Actually, this body of work has progressed at an international level and there is a new standard you should be striving to,” or, in fact, “you are failing to meet existing standards.”
When it comes to traumatic incidents in the AMC, particularly for our Indigenous detainees, I think the other thing this points to is the necessity to remain focused on addressing the overrepresentation of First Nations people in the corrections system. This needs to be done in a considered and systematic way, in consultation with the community, and this has to form part of our ongoing work in this space.
We have started our work on this. We have started our work on this through, particularly, a government policy commitment to justice reinvestment—the idea that we should focus our resources at the front end of the system to avoid Aboriginal people going to jail in the first place and that we should invest our effort, our funds and our focus in preventative systems into therapeutic care systems, into support systems that actually address the injustices that Aboriginal people face in Australia and help them avoid involvement with the criminal justice system.
We have made a start in this space. We have seen pilot programs; we have seen the beginnings of important pieces of work: things like the Yarrabi Bamirr program, things like bail support programs. These pilot programs are proving to be effective—things like the Warrumbul court and the Galambany court—but we have much work to do to continue and improve them, because we still see a significant overrepresentation of First Nations people in our justice system.
I will provide an update to the Assembly later this week on work that we have been doing in this space, as I undertook to do when a resolution was passed here in February. My response has been slightly delayed by the lack of sitting days, but I will give it this week. In that, I will detail the work that Minister Gentleman, Minister Stephen-Smith, Minister Davidson and I particularly—but with support from Minister Berry and Minister Vassarotti—have been doing and the conversations we have been having with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community to address that overrepresentation and to look at the practical measures we can take to turn around those decades-long trends here in the territory.
Let me conclude by touching on, I think, the very important human element of this story. We as a government need to empathise with the individual who was subject to the forced strip search. The report makes for sobering and disturbing reading, and I encourage people to read it if they have not had the opportunity to do so. It does lay bare the circumstances very clearly and the difficult circumstances that sit around this matter. The trauma inflicted on the individual was significant and concerning. It of course also needs to be seen in the context of the lead-up events—and again Mrs Kikkert touched on this—because not only the history of the individual, her complex and traumatic history, but also the inability for her to attend her grandmother’s funeral and the importance of sorry business, particularly for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community, should not be lost sight of in this discussion.
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