 Hello everybody and welcome. I'm Daryl Karp, I'm the Director of the Museum of Australian Democracy here at Old Parliament House and just a reminder before we get started to check your phones and if you're brave enough to turn them off and if not to turn them on to silence please. I'd like to begin today by acknowledging the first Australians on whose land we meet and whose cultures are among the oldest continuing cultures in human history and I particularly want to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we're meeting today, the Ngunnawal and the Nambri people and pay my respects to their elders past and present and I want to acknowledge other Indigenous people in the room today. Joining us tonight, should I say joining us today, it's been a long wake of lots and lots of presentations. I'd like to acknowledge Professor Mick Dodson, Director of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at the ANU, John Stanhope who's the former Chief Minister of the ACT, Professorial Fellow and Director of Public Engagement at Canberra University's Institute of Governance and Policy Analysis or as we colloquially call them IGPA and Jack Waterford, journalist, commentator and Canberra Times Editor-at-Large. Welcome gentlemen. For many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders this building is associated with much pain and sorrow but key decisions in the fight for Indigenous rights were shaped by many of the debates meetings and decisions that took place within these walls as well as those protests that took place at the Tent Embassy and elsewhere in Australia. So I think it's particularly fitting that we're meeting today in this extraordinary member's dining room in Old Parliament House to explore a new philosophy for dealing with Indigenous incarceration and justice reform and we'll hear more about that shortly. Before though it gives me great pleasure to introduce today's speaker Jack Waterford who began his career in journalism as a cadet with the Canberra Times in 1972. He was then appointed Deputy Editor in 1987, editor in 1995 and Editor-in-Chief in 2001. Jack is well known for his investigative journalism using Freedom of Information legislation and for his work and advocacy on Indigenous health issues. Jack was named a member of the Order of Australia in 2007's Australia Day Honours for Service to Journalism particularly as a commentator on national politics the law raising debate on ethical issues and public sector accountability and to the community in the area of Indigenous affairs. Also in that same year he was named Canberra Citizen of the Year and on presenting the award ACT Chief Minister John Stanhope said, Waterford was a champion of many causes and a leading figure in his trade. Please welcome me, please welcome me, please join me in welcoming Jack to the stage. I think that should be a bit better. In echoing the acknowledgement you've made of Country England, I want to emphasise that we're not entirely speaking about Indigenous problems although it forms a very large part of what we are talking about today but I thought I might introduce a little bit of that larger part by recalling a Canberra Citizen that some of you may recall of about 30 years ago or 50 to 30 years ago by the name of Raymond O'Shunnessy. Raymond who I very fondly remember was a one-man crime wave of a particular sort. He didn't bergle people's houses, he didn't have a drug problem, he was awfully fond of Greyhounds and things like that but I don't think he ever did anything illegal with them but he had a strong sense of justice. He was at one stage the secretary of the trades and labour council and he was always in strife in one way or another and the way in which this strife would be manifested is he would go around to see the director of housing or the director of this or the director of that and camp in his office and the police would have to be called to remove him from the office and then he'd be taken down to the cop shop and be required to sign the bail and the bail would ask him whether he would agree not to go back to the office and he'd say no so he'd get cut off to golden jail or whatever. Anyway, Raymond probably caused all by himself something like 20 or 30 million dollars of the protective security that we have around government officers in the ACT long before Al Qaeda or Islamic State was even heard of and he was always in trouble with the courts and at one stage he was in trouble with the ombudsman, he was in trouble with the director of housing, he was in trouble with the department of industrial relations and so forth like that. They held a big conference about what are we going to do with this person and the director of the commissioner of the Australian Federal Police at that stage was a fellow called Major General Ron Grey and he said I recommend that what we do is that we get him a suite at the lakeside hotel and give him a couple of thousand dollars a week spending money and everybody had their polite laugh and said but what do you really think we should do and he said no no I'm perfectly serious this man is costing us many times that in all of the problems that he that he's bringing on and this is very much what justice reinvestment is all about it's about the concatenation of factors that are making jail a fairly predictable outcome for a little too many Australians including Indigenous Australians and it's about the concatenation of interventions that we could be making before a jail arrives as an option but to make jail less likely outcome. There are all too many Australians there are all too many Indigenous people who are spending all too much time in jail I'm not arguing with the judges about whether people deserve it or not in a particular circumstance or whatnot I'm raising the question now whether a spending of a slightly different order before doing people's child would focus on education and on jobs and whatnot could make that jail something that was less inevitable. Now today I'm not the expert on this subject I'm raising some of these issues and I'm raising them not just in the course of the discussion that's been taken place here with the Indigenous National Indigenous Centre but also in relation to programs that have got underway in Burk and in Sejuna and in Kaurah which I hope Mick will be describing to us but also in terms of the question of whether the ACT which should be a model of such sort of intervention programs should go into this field and if so what they must do to go into it in a fair dink and way. Now in getting things going I think we should start all first with Professor Mick Dodson who's a member of the Yawau people of the traditional Aboriginal owners of the things in the Broom area and he's director of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at the ANU and a professor of law at the ANU and a former as all of you would know Commissioner for Social Justice with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Mick I wonder if you could start off by telling us a little bit about the program that you're engaged in where it's going and what do you think that it might take us to. As Jack mentioned I'm involved in a research project the National Centre for Indigenous Studies and a number of my colleagues and from ANU and from other other places and we're working in Kauru we've been there for this is our third year looking at justice for investment and again as Jack indicated we're spending an inordinate amount of money and that's there is a view that this is a waste of public because there are many many people who would not be particularly low level crime for being poor and unable to pay fines and those sorts of reasons we're not saying there aren't some people who need to be in prison to protect society there are some bad people in society who need to look up but there are some people in prison that and in other tamed and youth centres that would not be there for lower level crime what's happened with the ballooning expenditure on corrections is that it's been taken off the services that have generally been centralised and the work we're doing in Kauru clearly indicates that because I've got to go to Dub A or Bathurst North this evening to get services that were once available in the town because the monies needed to build make available wall beds because the politicians are freaked about being soft on crime. You've done some work in Kauru, have you not, that actually attempts to quantify some of the the cost to the community of of crime in the community of sustaining jail etc Yes we have. The idea is to get that money back to the community so the community can reclaim its citizens if you like and I don't know the precise figures but in the last 10 years it's cost about in a small town like Kauru it's cost the tax payers 25 million dollars something of that order to put people by in Sydney or Dub A or somewhere else and that's 2.5 million dollars a year that doesn't add anything to those detained or imprisoned doesn't add anything to the community it actually takes the money out of it. The idea is that if people are there for lower level offences it would not be there. Let's give that money back to the community so the community can deal with the problem. The community can work out how to keep offenders out of trouble or to stop the offending and restore those services and facilities and even make them grander if you like you know it's it's cost a lot of money to keep one person in prison and it's a bad double for young people. It varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but it's you know upwards to 250-300 thousand dollars a year. Hence Jack's anecdote. It would be cheaper to put them in the lakeside and give them a thousand dollars a week to spend. That's madness that we're going to do something about because it's unsustainable. We need to deal with this in a different way is our theory if you like about our research and we're not actually implementing justice through investment in Kaur, we're testing the methodology and trying to get the community to build a model around and we've engaged the whole community in the process and they've been wonderful with Kaur people, they've been wonderful and it's not that we haven't had a pick up here and there and like all the searchers do but they've embraced it and very much on board with the with the idea. I don't really have to introduce John Standhart except to remind people about how his entire political career and even quite a bit of his post political career if he can be said to be in that as yet but has been focused around human rights issues but while he was a politician he was very much involved in and had to wrestle with the resources and the circumstances in which we created a jail in the ACT and just the sort of juggle of costs and benefits and what not that we're sort of talking about now. I wonder with the background of your experience in John and thinking of this justice reinvestment thing how you see the current situation in the ACT. Thanks Jack. I'd like to to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land we're meeting on today and to extend to them my respects. I'd like to to acknowledge my colleagues at Wanunga Nimitya, I am an employee of Wanunga Nimitya, a proud employee, it's one of the most satisfying jobs I've had in my life and I've learned a lot in the eight or nine months that I've been there I've acknowledged the significant number of my colleagues from Wanunga that are here today including new friends I've made in the Wanunga men's group who many of whom have a particular insight into some of the issues that we're discussing. I've reflected quite a bit on the ANC and the prison incarceration in the ACT. I did of course at the time that I drove the decision that the ACT should accept full responsibility for those people from within our community that was through the criminal justice system felt necessary to lock up and I drove that and I drove it with a view that we here in the ACT could be trusted to do it better than any of prison's interstate most particularly New South Wales to whom we at that time were transporting all of our prisoners and Goulburn in particular I think I the closest two closest prisons to the ACT of course were Goulburn and Kuma and I think I was mindful of the reputation of Goulburn rather than having had any particular insider person experience for what it was so I drove that decision having already introduced a human rights act for the ACT and I was very much motivated by some reading that I'd done around some of the experience from Europe most particularly in Norway and I remember reading an article headed Holden Prison Norway the most human rights compliant prison in the world and I thought oh we could take that title and it was my aspiration of course for the AMC that one day I would read in the Sydney Morning Hill the Canberra Times or the Guardian Alexander McConney Centre the most human rights compliant in the world and I'm still waiting of course and there has been some controversy around the prison it was an issue I just touched on it lightly because it's not necessarily all that relevant about the size of the AMC I brought the prison to a budget figure or prediction that I'd been given by my officials and I got the quote was around it was 128 million dollars and I said guys that's it that's your quote you know what we want and then I said finalize it get it all organized and don't dare ask me for another cent that's it at that number but of course they didn't the number blue as it tended to do and they came back so we need another 20 million bucks I said you can't have it so I told you that so we built the prison to a number and I think as a consequence of my language and my expectation that this be you know deliberately human rights compliant that it be compliant that it be client focused that it be a healthy prison that put the prisoner first that I expected the department and the corrections to actually then fulfill my expectations and to some extent as I look back and the fact that we've just added another 56 cells and 80 beds it seems to me counterintuitive to a restorative justice philosophy or mind-bent from within the ACT public service that you've got a prison you've got a certain number of beds you've got a government that is progressive and has demanded of its public officials that they implement policies that reflect the government's expectation and you turn you back for a couple of years and all of a sudden there's an extra 80 beds which flies in the face of the entire conversation I would have thought of around justice for investment and it is interesting I was told at the time I prefer that I remember having earnest discussions I'll join you now with you build a prison here in the ACT the courts will fill it and at that time we didn't we had a very low third capita or pro-rater incarceration rate in the ACT it's the fastest growing pro-rater incarceration rate in Australia at the moment and it's the fastest growing real increase in incarceration yeah the ACT there's a number of statistics in relation to Alexander McConnagy and the ACT that are ugly reading we are increasing the pro-rater rate of imprisonment faster than any other jurisdiction in Australia we are increasing the real rate of imprisonment in the ACT faster than any other jurisdiction starting from a low base and that's how I just from a very low base and for me it's somebody thinking that I was doing really great works inspiring to develop the most human rights compliant prison in the world of course there's a diversity that I have to deal with is that having built the prison we now see the ACT imprisoning canberrans at a faster rate than other jurisdictions around Australia and I'll not just touch on the indigenous it's an issue that I now I think a lot about indigenous issues these days and I've developed a level and degree of understanding that I have to say I didn't have when I was in politics which I wished now in retrospect that I did have and on our account and our account that is the Wananga Nimity R account the Wananga Nimity R account on Aboriginal people in the AMC today suggests that almost 50 percent of the women in the AMC are Aboriginal women and that we believe 28 percent of the men in the Alexander and Carnegie Center are Aboriginal men we are concerned that a number of Aboriginals are not declaring their Aboriginality when they're admitted to the AMC and I think there's an issue there for us to reflect on but in the context of justice reinvestment the other point I would make is that I think always intended that the AMC you know would be a beacon of justice reinvestment it was on that basis that I didn't launch when the average daily cost of maintaining a prisoner in the ACT runs out at $100 a day more expensive than the rest of Australia but I thought well there's justice reinvestment starting with this massive investment that the ACT government is providing and of course it's early days to see young prison and I'm not up to date with the data but I would I'm very interested in seeing whether that incredibly enhanced level of investment in each prisoner each day is paying dividends over and above the dividends that are being delivered and I would have thought it's a prime measure or a prime indicator of justice reinvestment how much are you spending to start within your prison on each prisoner Now John a major issue about justice reinvestment of course is not having people in jail in the first place because they've been if you like diverted out the system but a subsidiary issue of course is that people who have got to jail are not then becoming entrenched as a part of a jail population or institutionalized and so forth and that's in part a function of the programs that you run in jail whether for occupying people giving them things to do providing them with deficiencies in their education and whatnot what do you hear about the AMC in relation to that Well I think the first challenge for all of us is to better understand why it is that Canberrans this most prosperous city in the world are still being incarcerated at the rates they are and most particularly Aboriginal Canberrans you know why is it that from a base population of 1.7 percent Aboriginal people within this community are 28 percent of the people we encounter at the numbers there are 6,000 Aboriginal people in Canberra 1.7 percent of our population and yet that 1.7 percent of our people produce 28 percent of the people that we through our systems lock up so I think we need far greater attention to those determinants that actually have led to that offending in the first place and we all know what they are in relation to you know the childhood the early life the difficulties at school non completion at school difficulties in obtaining employment as a whole result of all of those collective things then the intergenerational trauma the depression the mental illness the drug and substance abuse and then imprisonment and then of course recidivism and there the issues so if I had an extra five million dollars today through a justice reinvestment program I would go to Julie Tongs and I would ask her to employ an additional 50 social health workers and case manage the families that we know will produce the next generation of criminals we know we almost know who they are my father was a school teacher and I never forget a conversation with him 35 years ago and he said to me I can I can tell you by the time a child is in year four whether or not they'll go to prison or the juvenile detention and I think you know we haven't learned from these things but I talked to some of the clients at Wanunga Nimitya that have spent time in the Alexander McConnor and I say oh what it was like and they say to me it was boring there was not enough to do there's no jobs you can't earn money the transitional release jobs into the community which was always the primary expectation of me but people when they left the prison would already have a job has not occurred to a degree that I think is necessary so some of the feedback I get and I would urge those that are doing looking at the justice reinvestment trial to talk closely to Aboriginal people and their experiences and what it is that they that they need just picking up on that I'm sure you would agree that you can in a carer or a bird or a sojourner or what not pretty much pick or a camera pretty much pick the kids who were candidates for prison now we're looking I think at all around at about a four billion dollars a year that's being spent one way or another on the justice system when you add in the cost of the corrective system on top of the police etc and about one billion of that is essentially going on Aboriginal prisoners or Aboriginal people in encounters with the system what are some of the sorts of interventions that you could imagine that might make a drastic difference to that predictive capacity You're asking me that question I know you're in a search on the subject but straight off the top I was enjoying John talking about it You know we asked we went and asked people I think the money should be spent on and that's where this is a in a sense a project that's in part founded on community development so I think that I have a strong view that the people who have the problem ought to be given the opportunity to solve the problem and we ought to put resources into that and that that that that applies to any community doesn't have to be an Indigenous community but if you strip resources and facilities and services out of that community of course they're going to have trouble keeping kids out of trouble for adult centers so we went and asked people and we asked kids we asked the police about the federal and state services and bureaucratic arms and we asked Aboriginal people of course we asked the hospital the schools we got a broad range of people involved in the project and we asked them what what happened we suggested we thought it should be for the community to tell us what would help and that's what I think we have to do because you get reactive politicians making decisions from afar and that gets sent down through the bureaucracy and then services tend to disappear because some shock jokers said you're too soft on crime for some other ridiculous reason that really has nothing to do with dealing with issues or the problems that went out to front of you and you know if we went out to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians said here look there's an extra billion dollars I'm sure they'd come up with very good ideas as to how to spend that one of the things that kids complain about in the car is there's no cinema there's nowhere to go and there's not apart from some sporting clubs there's not much happening outside of school for them so they wanted to send them a bill so they got somewhere to go they wanted safe houses they wanted shelter they wanted local businesses to give the younger people some opportunities to work while they're at school and those sorts of things and boredom seems to be one of the drivers of bad behavior so my answer to your question is we'll ask the bloody community I had one anecdote that sometimes I wonder whether or not police boredom is a part of the problem as well I'm thinking of a community but this could just be a typical one called Yundamu which is about 200 miles west of Alasprings but it was one of the communities which as a result of the the intervention of seven years ago was given Waco a whole array more policemen some of whom came from the OCT I might add and a seven million dollar police station now I think there were in fact more police needed in the community and the community actually wanted that but the very fact of there being more police in the community almost entirely dealt with the problem that there was there people didn't want the police rushing around arresting people they wanted police in the community so that if trouble developed there could be interventions and usually at a fairly low scale and believe you may the police generally in many of these communities are reasonably tolerant and inclined to keep the peace but the problem that then developed was that there was hardly anything happening that would justify such a large police presence so so as to justify their existence the police began then doing snap checks on whether everybody had their current driver's license or whether the vehicle was registered or whether they paid any of their fines and about I'm not joking about a temporary under vehicle to be mined bars for non-payment of rides or for driving motor vehicles while the vehicles are unregistered not in town or anything like that but just around the local community and I wonder whether or not well nobody in Yundamu before the intervention had got speeding fines post the intervention they put up speeding fines so people were getting caught for speeding well coercion is not going to work I mean that coercion doesn't work anyway it's not it's not the way to tackle and particularly in business affairs because people just disengage and that's what's happened in the intervention because it's seen as white fellow stuff this is what they want to do it's not what we want to do and in fact they haven't even asked us they just can pose this on us it doesn't work the need for politicians to be seen as tough on crime or not lily livid or to not have jails that are going to be described in the daily telegraph as air conditioned motels or what not in some parts of the world this sort of tendency has has been if you like a conservative somewhat right-wing tendency but we've seen in both Australia and in England people that you might describe as a broadly small liberal thing a tonic layer in particular and a bog car in New South Wales both of them supervise the long era of politics in which the job populations in one case of the United Kingdom and then another case of New South Wales increased by something like a figure of 150 percent what's happening with our politicians that they are falling so much into that rut well it's it's it's about it's just raw politics I guess yes it's I think I must say I think in the ACT the ACT government to be fair has held the line reasonably well on law and order and terrorism related scare campaigns etc etc and the rush to the rush to ignore the rule of law and to simply ignore some fairly basic human rights I think the Labor Party the Labor Party I think has been reasonably good on law and order issues as distinct from its the same sentimental role that it's played in relation to the Solon Seekers debate where the Labor Party has certainly joined in the rush to the populace bottom in relation to its attitude and its language around Solon Seekers and to some extent it's just an extension of the language that is used driven by perceptions of the community's expectation that criminals will be punished the desire for retribution need for revenge all of the things that the criminal justice system pretends that it's not there for but the community has very high expectations and and it's very difficult I think as a politician you know in relation to a heinous crime affecting a family and to see the family on the television crying and distraught understandably at a thought of it's been lost through a rape and murder for instance it's incredibly hard as a politician to stand up and defend a particular sentence when the family is crying for a harsher sentence or even for the death family it's tough but I think it is just a question of character really and the need to respect the rule of law and why we have it but but it is difficult there are and and I think and I don't want to I'm conscious that whilst 25 to 28 percent of prisoners across Australia are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders 75 percent aren't so it's there's an issue of course for the white community that produces from from whom I think a majority of criminals are produced first not to generalize but I think the other issue in relation to Aboriginal incarceration has to be around race there's some quite recent research that's been done that by an academic at Began University which suggests that on 400 I think thousand sentences that he reviewed in relation to cases where the the the identity of the offender could be was actually as it's time to be Aboriginal that they were twice as likely to be imprisoned for the same offence and you can't not assume that there's still some colour blindness in relation to justice and the way in which it's implemented so I think there are there's there's a lot of work that still needs to be done but but it's hard but it's we expect our governments not not to fall into those traps having said that and I might just add this because it's something that I'm must say I'm not particularly familiar with but I've just seen recently in the paper a debate about whether or not random drug tests undertaken at the Alexander McConnagy Center should be introduced and I've seen it even explained in some formal way that the the implementation of the the random testing is in order to actually assist in the imposition of penalties for those within side the AMC that are accessing drugs and using them and failing random bread tests and if that's not punitive and contrary I think to what I would have thought though I should hasten to add I'm not all that familiar with the policy but as I understand it the AMC proposes to introduce broad random drug tests but if I breath test drug tests and and that the and that the outcomes of those drug tests will lead to some punitive outcome which I assume will then impact on the potential release date of a person that's punished as a result of taking a substance which the prison authorities for whatever reason were unable to prevent being introduced into the prison in the first place so I'm interested in a punitive outcome for prisoners that are revealed or consumed a delicit substance but I'm not sure that there's any punitive out punitive outcome for those officials at the AMC who let the drug in in the first place I hope they're not on performance payments well of course whenever anybody suggests that there are only so many tennis balls that are thrown into the AMC fence and possibly the staff have something to do with the introduction of some of the drugs the heavens fall upon us yes I'd never suggest that is there any comments or questions from the floor we seem to get a big response when John suggested that if he had an extra five million bucks he knew exactly what to do with it and there's a good response around so the question is what have we got to do to get extra five million bucks what is it that's going to alter the position of our politicians from short-term lock them up type response to long-term thinking well well I guess we're as with everything there's a need to establish well I guess initially need to establish the need and what the what the the potential outcomes of such an investment might be I have to say and you know I could be accused of lacking some objectivity as an employee when I go I acknowledge that but from what I've observed and what I've seen and and of understandings that I've developed in relation to the circumstances of some Aboriginal families within the ACT I cannot believe that that should be the the the first step in seeking in a justice reinvestment sense the first step in seeking to reduce offending from within the Aboriginal community and I can't believe it would be different in relation to an identifiable class of non-Indigenous people from whom from whom you know potential offenders come that a greater involvement in their in in then in in meeting their needs would not result in very act you know there was some very worrying you know we pry ourselves and we justly can can was a wonderful city and we've got a lot to be proud of but we have an underclass that most of us have no interaction but there are 6,000 Aboriginal people in Canberra I would suggest a significant proportion to them whilst acknowledging that many Aboriginal people in Canberra have happily joined the middle class and hold down stable jobs and and and and have no acts have no contact with the criminal justice system there's a significant cohort of Aboriginal people and families here that live in dire in dire circumstances and they need more more support and know from that same based population of 1.7 percent 25 percent of all children in care and protection in the ACT are Aboriginal children you know coming from around about 75 families you know we know who they are when Anga and this is my point when Anga Nimity deals with all of those families those 70 families probably every day of the week but with very limited resources and having regard to that full range of sort of social indicators or social determinants you know we can touch on some that we can't provide holistic care this issue I distracted or digressed but I saw the numbers in the last closing the gap report the ACT which should be the exemplar on average an Aboriginal child in year 10 in the ACT misses three days of school a week I can't believe that can't be fixed I can't believe that there's not some way through dedicated social health type workers if you can't get an Aboriginal kid to go to school every day when you get them to year 10 and you get them there seven days a week why can't you get them there seven days a fortnight why can't you get them there 10 days a fortnight and if you're getting through year 10 on only seven days of ten it's out of every fortnight I don't think you're going to get a two in the year 12 even if you get to year 12 so we're making great strides and I acknowledge that we're making great strides in the education of Indigenous kids but I talk to people around Whanunga Nimitya people from the Aboriginal community and there are there is still a major issue in the transition from primary school to high school there are still significant numbers of Aboriginal kids start wagging school the minute they get to year seven goss they're behind they become embarrassed like that someone will become shamed that they can't keep up with their homework they feel ostracised and they drop out and then we know where they go can I just add to that and agree with what you know more or less about 100 the families can be nominated and talked about in many cases you don't have to do very much more than three to four to three families are okay um firstly I'd like to acknowledge the normal people the traditional traditional owners and pay my respects to both elders past and present I find that very interesting and as the CEO of Whanunga we work with 74% of the ACT Aboriginal community and we do have some real problems in this community but Whanunga went into golden jail for 10 years before Alexander McConnacky opened and we also went to Kuma jail when it reopened so we've been in the prison system for a very long time we developed we we developed the model for healthcare in the prison um before it even opened but it was never ever picked up our model could be used for the whole prison what we want is to make sure that our young people are getting cultural support around identity and other issues health health regardless of whether you're black, white or rindle health is health everybody is entitled to proper health care John and I met with the Chief Magistrate Lorraine Walker a couple of weeks ago and uh she wanted to talk to us about options for our people instead of sending them to prison and uh she said because every Aboriginal offender that goes before the court actually speaks highly of Whanunga and that Whanunga's supporting them we are supporting not only the prisoners but we're supporting their families on the outside so Whanunga is more than a health service we're a comprehensive primary healthcare service a lot of our people shouldn't be in jail they're in there because they've got mental health issues they've got drug or alcohol issues they should be getting proper health care until we address all your underlying causes we're still going to end up with a prison full of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people it's up to us as a community to stop that and you know regardless all people are entitled to proper health care when you go to prison you lose your right to Medicare so you don't have a choice of provider and I know when I commence work at Whanunga 18 years ago I had the biggest arguments with the with James Ryan who was the head of corrections at the time about Whanunga going into Belcon and Remarne Centre and providing a clinic for our Aboriginal inmates because they were there they already are clients on the outside so why wouldn't we want to follow that journey and that's what we do at Whanunga so we're more than just a health service we do everything Aboriginal at Whanunga we have a social health team that supports all these people regardless of whether you're on the inside or the outside and working with families I just feel really disappointed that you know we don't get any funding from the community services department to work with these families or these people all our funding is health funding and self-generated income so you know I think it's time for people in the room to take a really good you know and have a really good think about what effort you want to put into if you're serious about justice reinvestment then you need to come to talk to me and our men's group and others in this room if we're really going to make a difference thanks just echoing that Julie I might remind you that when the first Aboriginal Medical Service was established in Australia at Redford in I think 1972 the very first employee that it had was Shirley Smith mum Sheryl and her first and most dedicated thing which she became quite famous although she'd been doing it for years beforehand was visiting the jail that morning at Ronnie Glock's room I'm an ex-prisoner I was in AMC what you need to be investing is um what they need places to stay you know I mean they need accommodation they need jobs and supervision you know I mean that's what people need to keep them out of jail you know that's something in life man because they've got nothing you know if you get them into accommodation with supervised people that's going to get on a job that's what they need thanks Rodney because of that color of their targets and that they're a statistic and what I'm getting at is if when I've asked for support for them I've either had they've either had to commit a crime to be in the system so there's no prevention whatsoever and that's right across the board from their schooling like they go to school but there are issues at school and I'll tell you why they're not going to year 10 is because of racism it's blatant racism that they're not going they get to year seven they're going to school no worries and when they get to year eight they're told they can't do this they can't do that they can't be like this and they're adults at home they're looking after parents and grandparents before they get there and they're told they can't be treated like that at school they can't talk to them and teachers are saying you got to respect me yet they're not respecting them as individuals that's why they're getting into the statistics of the racism at AMC or wherever how's that is that working wrong end of the instrument um there was a couple of things including what the last intervention raised but the center I directed the I knew National Center for Indigenous Studies so interestingly we have another project we're about to begin and it's called in shorthand it's an Australian Research Council funded project over three years I think and it's called deficit discourse and we're looking at what happens in schools we're looking at this discourse where teachers students anybody else working in the education system administrators bureaucrats what have you even politicians have this constant narrative about how deficient Aboriginal kids are and Aboriginal people generally and it's a it's a subtle form of racism and we're looking at schools in the Northern Territory in Queensland in Victoria and I think there's one in the ACT I'm not sure but we're going to examine this question of that I think provides some explanation to why attendance is down when kids get to by the time they get to year 10 but there's also difficult the other end no in preschool kindergarten and year one attendance is a problem a lot of that is around economic social issues there's been some research done around that in particularly in East Perth a few years ago but the other question that needs to be asked and you've raised the issue you know that what's the school offering that his kids accept the one size fits all and you know kids have to come from somewhere they've all kids come from somewhere through education and if that's not respected they're not going to succeed and that happens too much around the country and schools get closed or kids you know there's a the great saviour amongst some of the commentary it is that boarding school stands up at the boarding school for six bloody years you know it's a tough place and it's not a place for everybody and it ruins people it destroys them they never get over it I've got mates that I was at boarding school with 40 odd years ago who still haven't recovered and those who sing the praises of boarding school ought to do it with a great deal of course of course with a great deal of course the other issue about the Julie raised around no lack of funding for I think in the last 10 years ACT's be true lack of funding or the withdrawal of funding have gone from nine support organisations down to three and Wananga is one of them because government just withdraw withdraws the money perhaps they needed to put into prisons I don't know but in the last two years or the last two budgets in Australia under the I won't blame Mr Turnbull but under Mr Abbott and the former treasurer roughly 750 million dollars has been taken out of the Aboriginal Affairs Budget and organisations across the country have closed down who try and keep people out of some of them try to keep people out of prison some of them try to help those when they're released to get a job get somewhere to stay brother you know and this is what the people in care are saying to us it's bloody hard to get a job when you've got a criminal record you need support back in the community you need somewhere to stay to start with and you need you know you need to be job ready or have an opportunity to get job ready when you get out all of these things that get compounded by ripping out services and sending people people away there was there was one other thing that I wanted to talk about and I can't remember what it was in response to what's been said so far but off shut up now Jack I don't know whether any of you know this couldn't possibly happen in Australia or not but there's a generic joke amongst Afro-American people of the existence of a criminal fence in the United States called DWB driving wild black because despite vehement police denials of anything in the nature of racial profiling or anything like that the fact is that if you were driving if you're an Afro-American person driving a vehicle the chance of you being quite randomly stopped by police is about 30 or 40 times what it is um then if you weren't I sometimes suffer from this thing myself I went through airport security again today and as on every occasion the last 30 I was one of the persons taking the side and asked to have me sniff a gunpowder or something like that I'm not quite sure why I look like such a potential terrorist but however vehemently it's denied that um that I look like one or that I the claim this thing that's getting beyond the coincidence I was just thinking what Nick said there about I had eight years of boarding schools and there's something about boarding schools and institutions if you've been in one institution whether it's a children's home or a jail or the army or a boarding school it marks you it doesn't necessarily uh drag you down some people benefit some people don't or anything like that but you always survive I ran into an old friend of mine once and he said oh Jack how are you we sort of tender for a while and he said what are you doing here and that was a school reunion and I said what do you mean he said of course they do what do you think you know straight after I left school I went into the army I was in Vietnam and then I got demobilized and a week after I was demobilized I got caught in the cross with seven pounds of dope and I did seven years in Long Bay he said I always thought I meant you Professor Doddton I was wondering if you could comment I'm conscious of time but comment on signs of progress that we're making in the ACT towards implementing a justice reinvestment approach no yeah exactly signs of progress that we're making in the ACT towards having a justice reinvestment approach here well I think the the sign of progress is a deliberate decision by the ACT government which has been funded to to to develop a basis from which to pursue a justice a justice reinvestment strategy in the ACT there is a clear political commitment clear commitments are always clear when they're funded which has some funding for a trial and I think in relation to justice reinvestment it is very important to think I think very clearly rigorously about what you're doing the data you need how you're going to measure it there's a whole range of issues that need to be taken into account I think intuitively or instinctively I know I said I know what I would do I would fund when I'm going to do that but that's an instinctive response and I think if we are to engage seriously with justice reinvestment then we do need to take some serious to do some serious thinking I guess what I would ask as an advocate or an employee of Wanonga Nimitya but interested generally in corrections is that there be genuine consultation and engagement I'll say it here now because I believe it clearly that there is not nearly enough engagement with the ACT government with Wanonga Nimitya with Aboriginal people at the Colface within the ACT and I'm concerned that that extends or I'm concerned that that not extends to the consideration or deliberations that are currently underway in relation to justice reinvestment but to give the ACT Government credit there are very strong indications that the ACT Government is genuinely interested in pursuing justice reinvestment I think it's a I think it's the only government in Australia really that has put the money where they mount this I don't know if any other jurisdiction has done should I just go back to something Jack that I remember now I said there was one thing I didn't remember about starting this off you know necessarily has to be financially funded front-end later because you can't just rip the money out of the prison those in prison have to have support so it's not it becomes unattractive to politicians because you're going to put the money up front and gradually claw it back from the prisons and once you get those low-level offenders out of the system or get a lot of the kids out of the system you know it costs double the amount to keep a kid that does an adult locked up sounds counterintuitive but that's partly because the kids are going to be provided education but the argument for the politicians ought to be in the end if if you could get them to think beyond the next election is that you're going to save a swag of money here it's not going to happen in the first five ten years because you're going to have to undo all this stuff and claw the money back and meanwhile you have to put the money into into re-establishing the services and facilities that are required for the community to take back their citizens there's one other aspect and we talked about imprisonment rates and so forth you would be wrong to think that there's a close relationship between crime rates there's probably an association between imprisonment rates and the amount of time Ray Hadley and Alan Jones and the Daily Telegraph rant on about the subject but the overall level of crime in the community is generally falling even as not only is the imprisonment rate increasing but the length of time that people are serving in jail is increasing so the fear that some people might have that doing something about justice reinvestment or doing something that is focused on the families and the circumstances and whatnot is somehow going to let loose mass murderers or something like that in the community is actually taught we're dealing with perceptions here not facts about a rising level of crime which needs to be curved or some message sent or anything seems like a good note seems like a good note on which to end it can you join me please in thanking our three extraordinary guests mcdodson john stanhope and jack wardford for joining us i'd like to have one just just to let on in some information in regards to channel seven actually sorry but i did have my end up earlier darling okay in in regards to channel seven look i was i've been a public servant since i was 19 years old i went through the 50s 60s um and i was a public servant had baby and whatnot so when it comes to racism and institutional racism when you've got one black person working out in a system of white people you know i adjusted to that it's just that they had to adjust to me but when it comes to funds for medical centers um social justice mom you know um child protection and and things like that i i don't know if everybody knows it but channel seven actually has waged a war on the uh federal government australian federal government over the last 10 years okay i'm information for information in regards to aboriginal funding aboriginal funding and the outcomes of aboriginal funding since um we first got it in the late 60s early 70s okay that was done please that was done three years ago then and i've never heard anything else on it anything else on it so it's there in black and white but no one in the public arena actually knows anything about it so i just want to put it out there that it's there you can get all the results from um from um aboriginal funding from day one and the outcomes on it but the federal government and channel seven will not will not let it be known channel nine might let it be known either because they took my thing status down on facebook three weeks ago and i questioned it okay now thank you very much i've had more say thank you i was just going to say i'm sure all of us would be happy to talk to you outside uh after this particular event and see if there's anything more that we can um add to that thank you all very much for joining us i know we have run slightly late and thank you for igpa and university of cambra for setting all of this up thanks