Page 3756 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 24 September 2019
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will prepare a report for the court and make recommendations about suitability. Health will play an essential role in ensuring that the court has sufficient information to make a decision about whether a person can be sentenced to a drug and alcohol treatment order.
Because of this assessment process, by the time an offender becomes a participant, they will already know the health professionals on the drug and alcohol court team. Fostering these relationships from the beginning puts the focus where it should be: on harm minimisation and rehabilitation.
The ACT Health Directorate and Canberra Health Services are working very closely with the Justice and Community Safety Directorate to ensure that the necessary services are in place when the court is operational at the end of this year. In particular, ACT Health has conducted a number of workshops with the alcohol and other drug sector in the ACT to determine what level of support services are required and how they should be implemented.
Minister Rattenbury spoke of a few important concepts around therapeutic jurisprudence and problem solving. This step that we are taking today is an important one in the ACT government’s commitment to building a restorative city, one that recognises the impact on victims of crime but one that also recognises the underlying causes of much crime in our community, and that we are all better served when we support people to rehabilitate, to live their better life.
Towards the end of last year I had the opportunity to visit the UK, and while I was there I visited the team at Opportunity Nottingham, a program that supports people who are very difficult to engage in the service system. To be eligible to be supported by Opportunity Nottingham, people needed to have at least three of the four factors in their lives of alcohol and other drug dependence, homelessness, mental health issues and engagement with the justice system.
It was very clear from those conversations that this work is difficult, but that it can make a real difference in individuals’ lives when there is a service that can take a therapeutic approach to providing wraparound services for people, to understand their real needs and the underlying causes of their drug and alcohol challenges. In particular, for many of those people, one of those underlying causes will be a history of trauma in their life, and particularly a history of adverse childhood events and childhood trauma. Getting to those underlying causes is fundamental if we are to address people’s drug and alcohol challenges and their interaction with the justice system.
Importantly, as we go forward, addressing those challenges earlier in people’s lives, and having early intervention when people have experienced adverse childhood events and childhood trauma, are critical. Of course, preventing the trauma that people experience in childhood is an important part of what we do every day in the children, youth and families portfolio, and in the portfolio of preventing domestic and family violence.
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