Page 4350 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 25 October 2017
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That is why the sharing of identifiable information about young detainees for the purpose of data matching is not allowable by law. As my amendment notes, the Justice and Community Safety Directorate is also not able to share information with the Community Services Directorate about adult offenders for this purpose. In this context, it is important to note that the AMC can seek youth justice information about individual prisoners from the Community Services Directorate which can be important in supporting individual detainees.
The ACT government recognises the importance of monitoring data over time and agrees that understanding the trajectories of young people exiting Bimberi Youth Justice Centre is useful. In fact, it is imperative. That is why the Community Services Directorate is working with the Justice and Community Safety Directorate to establish a process to share de-identified information that will provide data on the numbers of young people exiting Bimberi who go on to be sentenced in the AMC.
Data linkage work of this nature is technical and resource intensive and, therefore, may take some time. We need to ensure that appropriate privacy protections are in place for young people, including the inability to re-identify information. Appropriate data linkage policies and governance arrangements also need to be established to achieve a secure and reliable data source.
As I have just mentioned, some young people who leave Bimberi move interstate and they may receive custodial sentences in other jurisdictions. Sharing this information across jurisdictions will require significant governance and infrastructure, agreement between jurisdictions, and a technical solution to physically match data across multiple client management systems. The scale of this level of information sharing could only occur through the appropriate COAG body’s leadership.
I support the matching of de-identified data for the purpose of monitoring youth to adult recidivism. Matching ACT data from Bimberi to AMC would be the logical place to start and is, indeed, where agencies are already starting. My amendments, therefore, propose that the preliminary work undertaken in this area be reported through the blueprint task force. In undertaking this work, it is critical that the privacy, human rights and legislative implications for any proposals for information sharing are appropriately explored in order to provide a practical way forward.
In closing, I note again the complexity of the youth justice system as a whole and the critical importance of continuing our nation-leading work on prevention and early intervention so that we continue to see very low numbers of young Canberrans being sentenced to Bimberi in the first place. Finally, I acknowledge that those very low numbers add an additional complication to these data issues.
MR RATTENBURY (Kurrajong—Minister for Climate Change and Sustainability, Minister for Justice, Consumer Affairs and Road Safety, Minister for Corrections and Minister for Mental Health) (4.22): I welcome the fact that Mrs Kikkert has brought this motion forward today. It provides an opportunity to discuss a number of areas of relevant policy in this space: data sharing, recidivism and information sharing generally, which I think are all interesting topics. I certainly agree that it makes
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