Page 1073 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 May 2020
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state and territory governments “have a key role to play in implementing change in their prisons” to end Aboriginal over-representation and deaths in custody.
In 2012, the next year, you were appointed minister for corrections. In your eight years in this role you have overseen record rates of Aboriginal incarceration and the death of an Aboriginal inmate, and now repeated suicide attempts by another Aboriginal inmate, and you have refused to have him moved to another place.
Why, as the minister for corrections and the only Greens minister in the country, have you failed to address Aboriginal over-representation and our death in custody?
MR RATTENBURY: I have a great level of concern about the over-representation of Indigenous people in our corrections system. Of course Corrective Services takes people who are sent to us by the courts. So Corrective Services cannot directly influence how many Aboriginal people are sent to jail. That is a broader, system-wide question that, right across government, we need to address. However, I can say from a Corrective Services point of view that we are striving to provide the best possible support to Indigenous detainees.
I have taken the decision, for example, to have Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health Service as an actual health partner in the ACT jail. It is the only place in Australia where we formally have an Aboriginal health service operating in our jail. That was a recommendation given to us. It was actually a recommendation made first in 2010 but it was not acted on at the time. As minister I acted on that advice and have put that in place.
As minister I put a proposition to my cabinet colleagues that we should not expand the jail; that we should focus our resources on building communities, not prisons. If we had simply expanded the jail, more and more people would have been sent there and there would have continued to be an over-representation of Indigenous people. We are taking the policy decisions that seek to address many decades of injustices and many decades of problematic decisions. This is not an easy fix—
Opposition members interjecting—
MADAM SPEAKER: Members!
MR RATTENBURY: but we are dedicated to doing our best to try to turn that trend around.
MRS JONES: Minister, why, when given the opportunity to provide an in-person proper psychiatric assessment of this Aboriginal inmate, with mental health care that he needed, did you deny that opportunity to prevent the self-harm? Why did you fail to act at the time? He then ended up in hospital.
MR RATTENBURY: Mrs Jones’s question implies that this work was not being done already. There has been significant clinical effort directed towards this detainee.
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