Despair grips the children of the Dreaming

Russell Skelton | The Age | February 11, 2012

IT WAS a seemingly routine day in a thriving Arnhem Land township located on a bay facing the sparkling Arafura Sea. Northern Territory MP Marion Scrymgour had flown to the unnamed Aboriginal and islander community of 2000 to meet constituents, listen to grievances, and relay them to the powers that be in Darwin. ''I was walking from the council office to the health clinic when I saw all these people running, screaming and calling out.''

She stopped a panicked passer-by to ask what had happened and was answered by a swift gesture: a hand passing across the neck. ''It did not dawn on me at first what that gesture meant. Then somebody from the clinic said a girl had hanged herself. When I heard that she was 11, I thought, what is happening to our people and families? What is it that leads a young person to give up all hope and see no alternative in life but to leave?''

Flown by air ambulance to Darwin, the girl died in hospital after life support was turned off.

The circumstances of her death remain a mystery for most. Police requested that details not be publicised and the Coroner is yet to publish a finding - he may never do so, because not all suicides in the territory are subject to coronial investigation. Police reports are often accepted at face value and passed onto grieving families.

Scrymgour, who says she was told that the girl's desperate final act had had something to do with bullying, believes there is an urgent need for much more research into the territory's horrendous number of indigenous suicides. ''There had been a lot of bullying at school, but there is nothing cultural about a kid being bullied. That is an issue that can and should be dealt with.''

The shocking fact remains that more young girls are killing themselves than ever before in the Northern Territory. It is almost impossible to put an accurate figure on the precise number suiciding because of a time lag in reporting the deaths, but no one disputes figures complied in the NT Child Death and Prevention Committee annual report, showing that territory Aboriginal children are 3.5 times more likely to die during childhood than non-Aboriginal children.

Constitutional reform crucial to indigenous wellbeing

Noel Pearson | The Australian | December 24, 2011

There is an existential angst about the place of indigenous cultures in the Australian nation.

I HAVE been close to the epicentre of indigenous policy for 20 years now. During this time I have dealt with premiers and prime ministers, ministers and public servants, both great and small, smart and dumb, committed and careless.

I think I have seen every permutation of policy and program, and the swings of the policy pendulum from left to right and back again. Real progress has been made in some areas, but the larger picture is one of waste and failure.

Like other Australians who take this policy scene to heart, my moods swing from ebullient optimism to deep depression. The small gains lift me but the entrenched failures stricken me.

My experience is less than half that of Lowitja O'Donoghue, Marcia Langton and Galarrwuy Yunupingu. I recall sitting on the beach at Yunupingu's Arnhem Land outstation with former minister Mal Brough and hearing Yunupingu list the names of the prime ministers and ministers he had dealings with since the days of the Gorton government. His story could have been titled Groundhog Day.

It is not for nothing that the one conviction I share with these leaders is that constitutional reform which properly defines the place of indigenous Australians in the nation is a matter of first importance.

A Human Rights Agenda for the new Attorney-General

Human Rights Law Centre | 15 December 2011

Australia’s new Attorney-General, Nicola Roxon, was sworn in on 14 December 2011.

We asked some of Australia’s leading human rights advocates, activists and academics to tell us, in less than 100 words, what the Attorney’s top human rights priority or initiative for 2012 should be. We’ll be sharing more of them with you in the coming days and weeks.



Catherine Branson QC is President of the Australian Human Rights Commission

My hope is that the new Attorney-General’s priorities will include bringing along her fellow ministers and parliamentarians in making the new human rights scrutiny processes effective and seeing through the consolidation of federal discrimination laws process to create an effective national equality law. She should also ensure the ratification of the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and establish a national system of monitoring places of detention. Finally, the Attorney must ensure that human rights considerations inform policy in all areas of her portfolio, for example in security policy where there is an urgent need for a system enabling review of adverse security assessments.

Nicolas Patrick is a Partner and Head of Pro Bono with DLA Piper

I would prioritise the human rights of people in places of detention. A significant proportion of Australia’s prison population suffer from mental illness. There is a causal and consequential link between imprisonment and mental illness. Australia is warehousing people with mental health problems in prisons, where mental health care is entirely inadequate.

The number of juveniles in detention is also a major concern, along with the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. These issues raise significant concerns with respect to Australia’s obligations under the Convention against Torture, the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and require the urgent attention of the Australian Government.

Professor David Kinley is Chair in Human Rights Law at Sydney Law School

Dear Attorney,

Pay very close attention to the newly established parliamentary human rights scrutiny committee. This is a sleeping giant, whose potential power and range is underappreciated; indeed largely unnoticed. Having authority to scrutinise all bills for compliance with all Australia’s international human rights obligations goes far beyond the scope of any equivalent mechanism overseas, and it will embarrass and expose. So, heads up for the enhanced human rights scrutiny of the next wave of immigration, anti-terrorism or workplace relations proposals.

PS. Don’t take up smoking this year.





Ed Santow is Chief Executive Officer of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre

Over the last few years, the Australian Government has made progress in improving the protection of our basic rights. However, Australia still lacks a comprehensive human rights law. This increases the vulnerability of already disadvantaged people — like Indigenous Australians, people experiencing homelessness and people with a disability. To rectify this, the new Attorney-General should take the lead in fully implementing the recommendations of the 2009 National Human Rights Consultation, including by enacting a comprehensive Human Rights Act.

Nicky Friedman is Head of Pro Bono & Community Programs with Allens Arthur Robinson

The new Attorney should ensure that asylum seekers can access and exercise their legal rights.
Since the High Court’s decision in M61, which confirmed that review by the courts is available to asylum seekers who are processed offshore, legal assistance providers have been hit with floods of applications for legal representation in judicial review proceedings. Despite the huge increase in demand, no extra funds have been provided and legal aid and community legal centres are turning away desperate people. The Attorney should provide funds to boost the capacity of refugee and immigration community legal centres and legal aid commissions to deal with these matters immediately.

Professor Sarah Joseph is Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law

There are many human rights priorities for Australiain 2012, such as properly implementing the new Human Rights (Parliamentary Scrutiny) Act and vastly improving this country’s impoverished refugee debate. As the number one priority, however, I would say that the Australian Government must take the lead in vigorously supporting amendment of the Australian Constitution to better recognise and protect the rights of Indigenous peoples, and to educate Australian people about the need for such amendment. A campaign against Constitutional recognition has already begun (see eg, J Albrechtsen inThe Australian on 14 December). The government and the opposition must get on the front foot to counter the scaremongering.

Jailing fathers increases problems in Indigenous communities

Richard Fletcher | The Conversation | 13 October 2011

There are hopeful signs from a number of sources that the “get tough on crime” approach is working, with politicians promising the era of more prisons and longer sentences has had its day. Movements such as Justice Reinvestment – redirecting money earmarked for prisons to address disadvantage in communities…

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

Richard Fletcher receives funding from government and non government organizations. His research team developed the Brothers Inside program.



Measures are needed to reduce the number of fathers going into jail as well as the number not coming back. Casey Serin

There are hopeful signs from a number of sources that the “get tough on crime” approach is working, with politicians promising the era of more prisons and longer sentences has had its day.

Movements such as Justice Reinvestment – redirecting money earmarked for prisons to address disadvantage in communities prisoners come from – is one manifestation of a more rational and humane approach to crime.

For Aboriginal communities, where imprisonment has reached epidemic proportions, this shift is long overdue.

And the research community has a responsibility to make the costs more transparent, not just to the taxpayer but to Aboriginal communities, prisoners and prisoner families as well.

Deaths remove fathers completely

We were reminded of one aspect of these costs when marking 20 years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

In the time since that report highlighted the unacceptable, and often brutal, deaths of Aboriginal men in custody, 269 more Indigenous men have died in similar circumstances.

Most of the Aboriginal men who die in custody are fathers, as are most of those who remain in custody. And in Indigenous communities, both fathers and men who are not fathers have important roles to play children’s growth and well-being.

So, when Aboriginal men are removed from the community, the social and family relationships that might steer young people away from crime break down and the nurturing these men might provide is lost.

Breaking the prison cycle

Mike Steketee | The Australian | 15 October 2011

IN Canberra, a hung parliament has given a Labor Party too scared to take action on climate change before the last election the courage of its convictions.

In NSW, a very different parliament in which the government has a lopsided majority may have a similar effect on law and order policy. An opposition as weakened as that in NSW may not be ideal for democracy but it does allow the government to focus more on policy than populism. And in no area has the auction for votes been more unseemly or come at a greater cost to sensible policy.

As NSW shadow attorney-general, Greg Smith called a halt to the law and order auction. While strongly conservative, he saw during his previous life as a crown prosecutor the failings of the lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key approach - namely that, despite costing a packet, it does little to reduce crime and in some circumstances increases it. One pointer to that is the 43 per cent of prisoners who are back in jail within two years in NSW, compared with 34 per cent in Victoria, where there has been less emphasis on the punitive approach and there have been more resources for rehabilitation and other services for prisoners before and after they are released.

Now he is Attorney-General, Smith is saying much the same things and is starting to act on them. In parliament in May he claimed the previous government regarded the prison population reaching 10,000 as a badge of honour. "I thought it was a disgrace," he said. "This government does not believe success on law and order issues can alone be judged by how many people are locked up. We believe in policies that break the cycle of re-offending. Every prisoner should have an opportunity for rehabilitation and that is in the interests of the whole community."

Smith has commissioned a review of the bail act, particularly because of concern that too many juveniles are remanded in custody and are introduced to what he calls "the university of crime". He has asked the NSW Law Reform Commission to look at sentencing legislation to, among other things, give courts greater discretion. He has announced extra funding for education programs in prison, drug and alcohol rehabilitation services and a second drug court with detoxification facilities, drug testing and treatment.

It is early days and it remains to be seen where these measures lead and whether the O'Farrell government succumbs to a "soft on crime" campaign. Nor is the law and order traffic all one way: the government has legislated for mandatory life sentences for killing police officers.

But this is an issue which has come to defy political pigeon-holing. Bob Carr in NSW took the same attitude as Tony Blair in Britain: that a populist, punitive approach to law and order would protect his political flanks from right-wing attack. Pity about the merits of the policy. Now the coalition government in Britain is changing tack, as has the O'Farrell government. Yet its Liberal-National counterpart in Victoria is headed at least partly in the opposite direction, with moves for mandatory minimum sentences for some juvenile offences, despite the evidence of Victoria's superior performance with its emphasis on alternatives to prison.

The change in thinking was perhaps best captured by another conservative politician, New Zealand's deputy prime minister Bill English, who in May described prisons as "a fiscal and moral failure". No Kiwi, he confidently asserted, wanted to see more large-scale prison building.

Lionel Murphy Lecture - 'Vigilance against injustice in the justice system'

The Hon. Robert McClelland | Australian National University, Canberra | 7 September 2011

Acknowledgments

Good Evening, and thanks Professor Dietze for your very kind introduction. First, I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians on whose land we are meeting today – the Ngunnawal people - whose cultures we honour as among the oldest continuing cultures in human history. And I would like to pay my respects to Elders past and present.

I’d also like to recognise our hosts this evening – the ANU College of Law and in particular Associate Dean Fiona Wheeler and Head of School Stephen Bottomley; Members of Lionel Murphy’s family;
Trustees of the Lionel Murphy Foundation; Dr Kristine Klugman – President Civil Liberties Australia and Mr Bill Rowlings – CEO Civil Liberties Australia; Dr Helen Watchirs – ACT Human Rights and Discrimination Commissioner; Mr Daryl Dellora; Ladies and gentlemen.

Introduction

It’s a great honour to have been asked to speak this evening. I have entitled this year’s address as Lionel Murphy’s Legacy – Vigilance against Injustice in the Justice System.

And I wish to speak to the national shame that is the over-representation of Indigenous Australians in the criminal justice system.

And to the practical steps the Commonwealth and the States and Territories must take to right this enduring wrong.

This problem has been brought to the public’s attention this year particularly because of the 20th Anniversary of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the release in June of the House of Representatives Inquiry ReportDoing Time – Time for Doing: Indigenous Youth in the Criminal Justice System.

Lionel Murphy

But before turning to that I’d first like to pay a brief tribute to Lionel Murphy, whose memory we are here to honour tonight - a great Labor leader, an accomplished Attorney-General and an inspiring High Court Justice.

And in doing so, I would like to speak briefly of a judgment he wrote as a judge of the High Court - Neal v R.1

The case was that of an Aboriginal man, Mr Neal.

Mr. Neal was Council Chairman in Yarrabah, a community in Northern Queensland. This community had a deep sense of grievance about the paternalistic treatment by white authorities, including the management of the store which was reportedly selling rotten meat. Mr Neal had argued with the store manager about the management of the reserve. When the discussion reached an impasse, Mr. Neal swore at the store manager and spat at him.

For this, Mr Neal was sentenced to two months hard labour. On appeal to the Queensland Supreme Court, Mr Neal’s sentence was increased to 6 months.

Mr Neal then appealed to the High Court where Lionel Murphy presided.

The year was 1982, and Murphy noted in his judgment the appallingly high rates of Indigenous incarceration at that time – that although Indigenous Australians made up only 1 per cent of the total population they made up nearly 30 per cent of the prison population.

In addressing the question of Mr Neal’s relatively harsh sentence for what was a seemingly trivial offence, he said:

“That Mr. Neal was an ‘agitator’ or stirrer in the magistrate's view obviously contributed to the severe penalty. If he is an agitator, he is in good company. Many of the great religious and political figures of history have been agitators, and human progress owes much to the efforts of these and the many who are unknown. …Mr. Neal is entitled to be an agitator.”2

Needless to say, Mr Neal’s appeal was allowed.

So I’d like to draw some inspiration from Lionel Murphy tonight as I speak to the challenges that we currently face in terms of the overrepresentation of Indigenous Australians in the justice system - an injustice which remains nearly 30 years after Neal v R.

Prior to the recent Commonwealth Law Minister’s Meeting that brought together Attorneys General and Justice Ministers from across the Commonwealth, I had cause to reflect on the origins of European settlement in Australia. The British Transportation System arose from an attempt by England’s privileged classes to remove a so called “criminal class”.

Transportation included punishment for lesser offences that were more often than not the effect of extreme social disadvantage. Well that’s how Europeans originally came to Australia but as a law and order measure this policy was unsuccessful. Crime wasn’t addressed until chronic social disadvantage was addressed.

Today, Attorneys-General and Justice Ministers across Australia need to ask ourselves if we making the same mistakes in respect to the issue of the incarceration of Indigenous Australians.

The figures speak for themselves.

Booze Territory: The Crisis of Alcoholism

 Anna Krien | The Monthly | September 2011 

On a Tuesday morning, I make my way to the Gap View Hotel for a drinking session starting at 10 am. I’m told this is one of Alice Springs’ three notorious ‘animal bars’ but, when I get there, the hotel is all shut up. The car park is empty except for a car with an Aboriginal couple sitting inside. I tap on their window and wave my hand at the closed pub. “Not open?”

“2 pm,” comes the answer.

“Oh,” I nod. I’m about to get back into my car when I realise the woman is talking about the bottle shop.

“You mean the bottle shop isn’t open till two?” I ask. She nods. “You waiting around for that?” She nods again. “Isn’t there a bar here?” That’s when I discover a section of the pub is open. The woman directs me out of the car park, back along the main road and down the side of the hotel. A small concrete corridor with no roof doglegs until it is hidden from street view, where a toothless security guard greets me. He raises an eyebrow, then runs a metal detector across my clothes and confiscates my pens.

“Someone’s been stabbed with a pen before,” he says. “You can grab ’em when you leave, luv.”

Behind me an Aboriginal boy, just turned 18, offers a scrap of paper to prove he’s of age. Kindly, the security guard explains how to get a proper ID and turns him away. I walk up a cement ramp to a bar, billiard tables and pokies. There are lots of people milling around but the guy at the entrance tells me it doesn’t “get pumping till 11.30 am”, when the bar “switches to full-strength beer”. Techno music blares out of speakers. As I wander around, a Sudanese security guard approaches me, his face concerned. “Am I lost?” he wants to know.

In a way, I am. I don’t want a beer. It’s 10 am, for Chrissake.

*

At the Todd Tavern down the road it’s just after midday and the place is jumping. Billy Joel is on the jukebox and women jiggle in time, waiting to be served. On one side of the tavern is the Riverside Bar, the original ‘animal bar’, complete with blackened windows creating a kind of false night for its drinkers, who chuck their empties into wheelie bins dotted around the room. A lone white man runs the bar.

“They’re comfortable in there,” numerous people say to me when I ask about the low-slung ceiling that makes you hunch and the permanent night. “No oneforces them to drink there.”

In 2009 CCTV footage revealed 236 people inside the small bar at 11.48 am when it is licensed for 100 – the Todd was suspended from trading for 5 days. Today, around the other side of the tavern, the cleaner and more sophisticated bar with clear windows is also full of Indigenous people. What used to be a voluntarily segregated pub – blacks in the animal bar, whites in the classier section – is now black and black.

Outside, Indigenous people are hanging around the closed roller doors of the Thirsty Camel drive-through bottle shop attached to the Todd Tavern. Some form small groups, others wait in banged-up cars across the road, and a lone man, his purple shirt tucked into black pants, his belt buckle and boots shining, with a cowboy hat tilted over his eyes, leans against the brick wall, waiting.

At 2 pm the shutters will open, the tavern will close and the drinking will shift to the dry riverbed of the Todd River.

The change in the hour brings about a different kind of busyness as pubs are cleaned for the late afternoon trade. It is rush hour for Alice Springs taxi drivers. “No car, no drive-through” is the new rule for these bottlos (unless you’re white, in which case you can walk up and buy whatever you want), and taxis are hailed for the 10 metre trip and paid much, much more than the distance demands.

‘Bush’ minibuses that drive back and forth from remote Indigenous communities are cheered and hailed into the Gap View Hotel car park, the accordion doors opening for six or so blackfellas, some so zonked they can barely muster any sign of life. And then off they go! Through the drive-through!

I watch as the guy in the purple shirt and cowboy hat approaches the bottle shop and is shooed away like a feral dog. “No car, no drive-through,” an attendant yells at the man’s back as he slinks away.

Indigenous incarceration: jumping off the treadmill

ABC Radio | The Law Report | 12 July 2011

Indigenous incarceration: the figures are shocking. But what can we do about it?

Meet some people working hard to break the cycle in the Top End. Darwin based workers with the North Australia Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) help released offenders find education, work, and accommodation.

And if offenders come from remote, traditional communities they help smooth their return and deal with thorny issues like payback.

Hear the audio here and read the transcript below:

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Damien Carrick: Hello, welcome to the Law report. We know Indigenous incarceration rates are unacceptably high in this country, but what can we do about it? Well, there's no silver bullet. But today I'm speaking to people who work very hard to try and turn around the abysmal figures. Recently I was in Darwin, and I called in to the office of NAAJA, the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency. It provides legal aid services to Indigenous people across the Top End. But NAAJA staff do more than just represent clients in court. They also work with convicted offenders to re-integrate them back into their communities and to reduce their likelihood of re-offending.

Review to target Aboriginal jobless programs

Anna Patty | SMH | 25 June 2011

''We need to be investing more in education and employment services so that we are spending less on public order" 

THE steep reversal of a downward trend in Aboriginal unemployment in NSW in recent years has forced the state government to order an overhaul of employment programs that are failing.

The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Victor Dominello, has asked his department to review 10 employment programs, including Aboriginal Jobs Together, which the Auditor General strongly criticised last month.

The department has been asked to cost the programs and assess the number of job placements, traineeships and cadetships they produced. Retention rates and evidence suggesting the programs would prove to be successful would also be reviewed.

''These are programs designed to get Aboriginal people into employment. I want to know if they are working,'' he said.

Mr Dominello said the state government was spending an average of $78 on labour and employment services for each Aboriginal person, $104 on social security and $3817 on public order and safety. He said a greater investment was needed in education and employment initiatives to reduce the rate of entry into correctional facilities.

Community to reject welfare reform trial

Stefan Arblaster | SBS Radio | 23 June 2011

A Queensland Aboriginal community is set to reject an extension of the controversial Cape York welfare reform trial.

Mayors from four Aboriginal communities are due to meet the Queensland government to discuss the $14-million, one-year extension being funded by the federal government. 

The trial is the brain child of the Cape York Institute and its director, Aboriginal academic Noel Pearson, who comes from Hope Vale.

But Hope Vale mayor Greg McLean told Queensland correspondent Stefan Armbruster, the trial has failed and his community has had enough.

Call for radical intervention on juvenile justice

Sarah Dingle | ABC Online | 25 May 2011

The head of the St Vincent de Paul Society in New South Wales says it must be recognised that juvenile justice in Australia is an Aboriginal problem and that it needs to be dealt with accordingly.

He was one of the participants at a forum in Sydney last night which heard each young Australian offender costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to keep in detention, and that it is far cheaper to deal with them in the community.

A national report on young people in detention soon to be released calls on the Federal Government to adopt a radical preventative approach. St Vincent de Paul spokesman Graham West told the forum juvenile offenders needed more radical intervention than their adult counterparts.

"About half the population in juvenile justice is Aboriginal. This is an Aboriginal issue. The other issue that pops up immediately [is that] around 35 per cent have an IQ below 79," he said.

Mr West says it is time for a national rethink. Instead of dealing with the crime, he says, treat the symptoms.

"Justice reinvestment is about looking at what's causing people to end up there in the first place," he said.

"So rather than just we have a crime, we have people held responsible for it, and it goes back out, what's leading people in?

"We know Aboriginal communities are well and truly over represented around the nation and in knowing what communities they come from because we have that information, we can design interventions in those areas."

He says it is hard to define justice reinvestment, as every area is different. One successful pilot study in Newcastle reduced reoffending to a minimum. It involved an intensive supervision program for young offenders, where a worker was available 24 hours a day, could come around to their house and teach skills to their family. Mr West says programs which are family focused deliver some of the best returns.

"It's a whole approach premised on the fact that if we invest that money now, we don't have to invest $200,000 per year to keep someone in custody," he said.

"We can reduce those figures and that's where the reinvestment comes in."

Peter Murphy, one of the authors of an upcoming national report on young offenders and juvenile detention, warns justice reinvestment is a tough political commitment because at least at the start, it requires extra money.

"We need to continue with the current spend that we have around detention and community type programs, but concurrent with that, we actually need to start investing in communities where there is high rates of criminal behaviour," he said.

Mr Murphy says from a purely economical point of view, with an ageing population and a skills shortage, each Australian child is even more valuable than before.

"The Prime Minister has indicated we need every child to be succeeding in education and then joining the workforce, so we can't afford not to do it," he said.

Mr Murphy says political parties need to be in for the long haul. He estimates justice reinvestment will take about 10 years to deliver results.

Ineffectual bipartisanship ruins social policy

Noel Pearson | The Australian | March 26, 2011 

RECENTLY Mal Brough, former minister for indigenous affairs in the Howard government, told The Australian that the Northern Territory intervention was "just another failed program" because Labor had maintained the policy only for political reasons.

In essence Brough was saying that Labor's heart was not in it and, as a result, the intervention's aims had not been realised.

Brough is correct that the intervention has fallen short. From afar it appears some good things have come out of it, but on the whole it has not worked.

Had he remained minister he would have shouldered full responsibility for its implementation. From my experience of Brough, although he was a determined leader, he was amenable to advice and deeply committed.

Whatever people might have thought about the political motivations behind the intervention, for Brough it was always Aboriginal suffering that was uppermost.

Having said that, I think the present minister, Jenny Macklin, is equally committed and her extension of the income management reform principle to the wider Australian community is testament to that commitment. She has been steadfast in her support for our reforms in Cape York Peninsula, which she extended when she supported our schooling reform plan.

Brough and Macklin both erred in a fundamental respect in relation to the Territory, whereas they were correct in their support for our endeavours in Cape York during these past three years.