Page 2128 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 2 August 2016
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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers and is supporting 34 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families. It is expected that the benefits of this program will be realised this financial year, resulting in fewer Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children coming into care.
In the ACT criminal justice system, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people account for approximately 17.7 per cent of people. In the ACT youth justice system, pre 2013-14 data shows that, although Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander young people made up only three per cent of the ACT population aged 10 to 17, they represented 26 per cent of all young people under youth justice supervision on an average day. That is, they were 12 times as likely to be under youth justice supervision as compared with other young people in the ACT. This was lower than the national rate of 15 times.
Despite these concerning statistics, progress has been made recently in diverting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people from the youth justice system. From 2011-12 to 2013-14, the numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people decreased across a number of categories: youth justice supervision down by 35 per cent; community-based supervision down by 35 per cent; youth in detention down by 47 per cent; average time spent in custody at night reduced by 36 per cent.
There are other matters of concern for the ACT too. In the ACT, even though Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up only 1.5 per cent of the ACT population, during 2014-15 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people made up 15 per cent of the total number of people accessing homelessness services, an increase of one per cent from the 2014 rate of 14 per cent.
Even in the ACT public service, where great progress has been made in increasing the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public servants, in 2015 the average salary for an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander public servant was $6,631, or eight per cent, less than the average ACT public service salary. This was a greater pay gap than for women, people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and people with a disability in the ACT public service.
All this underlines the importance of maintaining focus on achieving more equitable outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the importance of reports such as this ACT closing the gap report that build the evidence for future policy considerations.
This is why this report sets out the full range of ACT government policies, initiatives and funding commitments across all service sectors aimed directly at contributing to more equitable outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, families and communities in the ACT.
I would like to take this opportunity to announce some changes to future ACT performance reports. The two previous ACT closing the gap reports were structured on the building blocks of strategic action areas underpinning the national Indigenous reform agenda targets. The ACT closing the gap report 2015 is now structured around the seven key focus areas of the new ACT Aboriginal and Torres
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