Wednesday, 22 March 2023

Bills

Children, Youth and Families Amendment (Raise the Age) Bill 2022

Second reading

Debate resumed on motion of Samantha Ratnam:

That the bill be now read a second time.

Sheena WATT (Northern Metropolitan) (16:34): I rise today to contribute to the debate on the Children, Youth and Families Amendment (Raise the Age) Bill 2022 before this chamber. Some of the remarks that I will make today will be incredibly personal and very, very challenging. I will do my best to keep it together as I think to reflect on particularly Aboriginal young people. Other members of our chamber have spoken already on this bill, and I will say first and foremost that none of us ever want to see a child in custody. Absolutely this should only ever be a last resort and only inside a system that protects and supports young people in custodial settings.

We do not take this issue lightly; we take this issue so very, very seriously on this side of the chamber. It is something that will not be quickly fixed with a few simple changes and tinkers to existing legislation. This is significant. Any and all changes to the minimum age of criminal responsibility require careful planning and consultation with stakeholders, with community partners, with experts, to determine the most appropriate, the most respectful and the best way of achieving these reforms. Changes have to serve a dual purpose of achieving the best outcomes for children and their families and ensuring the safety of all Victorians.

We already know that the most effective way of keeping our young people out of the criminal justice system and out of custody is to ensure there are effective diversion programs and pathways for young offenders to give them the support they need and the chances to address offending behaviour. Our government’s diversion statement released in April 2022, Diversion: Keeping Young People Out of Youth Justice to Lead Successful Lives, further supports this commitment to early intervention. The statement is underpinned by a fundamental understanding that diversion and early intervention are the most effective and fiscally responsible ways of reducing youth crime. That is why our government has continually invested in successful diversion programs within the youth justice system. That is why the last Victorian budget included more than $600 million as part of a package of investments that focus on the justice system, including youth diversion, reducing reoffending, increasing mental health support and providing financial assistance to victims of crime. I note that this is building on investments that are already seeing young people successfully diverted from the youth justice system, including more than $15.5 million which has been provided to a range of programs to prevent more young people entering the system and ensuring that those who do have the best chances of rehabilitation.

We are also continuing to implement the Youth Justice Strategic Plan 2020–2030. I did take the time out to read that and noted that upon the release of this plan in 2022 it committed to age-appropriate responses for 10- to 14-year-olds to keep them out of the youth justice system. This youth justice strategy also sets out a framework to address and take action on reducing the overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in our youth justice system. It is something that so very many of us take so very, very seriously. We are committed to addressing the overrepresentation of Aboriginal children and young people in youth justice outlined in the first ever Aboriginal youth justice strategy, which launched just last year.

I will also take a moment to acknowledge and thank the members of the Aboriginal Justice Forum, who were acknowledged in the ministers statement during question time today by the Attorney-General. I previously have sat on the Aboriginal Justice Forum and know just what a powerhouse of reform that group is. So to you for all the work that you do, can I give you and send to you my acknowledgement and my deepest thanks. Of course you are tackling some of the biggest, most wicked challenging problems in our state, and you have been doing it in partnership with the Victorian government for 23 years. For some of them I was sitting side by side as a member of the Aboriginal community controlled sector, and now I am proud to be part of a government taking it so very seriously.

In fact when it comes to Aboriginal youth justice we saw that strategy launched last year with a $55 million investment. Of course at about this time last year, in February in fact, the government launched Victoria’s first Aboriginal youth justice strategy, Wirkara Kulpa, which focuses on diverting young people from the youth justice system and addressing overrepresentation. Can I take a moment just to acknowledge the Koorie Youth Council for their leadership and role in that. I have met with them around a range of issues, and as a previous member of the Koorie Youth Council it brings me great pride to see that organisation stepping up in a really significant way, driving some really significant reform in our state. To the members of the Koorie Youth Council, to our Koori leaders that have stepped up for our community and for their peers, for their families and for the future generations of young people, thank you. Thank you very much.

Of course, as I said, this is all part of our work with the Aboriginal communities to improve outcomes for Aboriginal youth, including the Aboriginal justice agreement and the youth justice strategy. Our strong focus on investing and diversion and addressing overrepresentation has in fact yielded some positive results, and I just want to take a moment to speak to them now. For the 2018–19, 2019–20 and 2020–21 year periods there were no children aged 10 to 13 years old in youth justice custody serving a custodial sentence. In 2021 Victoria had the lowest rate of Aboriginal young people aged 10 to 17 in detention, around a third lower than the national average. That is not to say, not for a single moment, that there is not more work to do to drive these numbers down, and this is work our government has made clear it will be progressing and is absolutely committed to. That could not be any more clear than it was in the remarks made by the Attorney-General during her ministers statement during question time today.

Further to that of course is the investment of more than $2 billion into the justice system since 2014 to rebuild and strengthen the justice system. Last year’s state budget provided over $400 million in funding over four years to improve youth justice services, including Cherry Creek but also including some diversion programs, to ensure that young people have the best chances at rehabilitation – and there was a very significant $11 million investment.

Look, there is of course more to be done, but for the small proportion of young people who end up in youth justice custody we are focused on providing a safe and stable environment in our youth justice custodial facilities. We have introduced targeted behavioural programs and an intensive intervention unit for the most high-risk young people in custody, including behaviour support specialists to support custodial staff to address challenging behaviours amongst young people and dynamic risk assessment. Further to that I will just take a moment to acknowledge Tiana – you know who you are – and her work with young people over now almost the entirety of her career. It is not lost on me the enormous challenge that you have taken on, and to you and your colleagues, thank you. Thank you for doing what you do for our community. I am constantly in awe of your resilience and strength to stand up for the next generation of Aboriginal young people.

Of course I want to talk about funding for the Aboriginal youth justice hubs, which are something that I know to be a very significant thing to come to our justice system – really a system that is embedding Aboriginal self-determination in service delivery – and we know that these improvements are working. We do not want to see that children and young people are unnecessarily remanded over weekends because there is no available court to hear bail applications. So the $11 million budget commitment towards the central after hours assessment and bail placement service and fund for the weekend online remand Children’s Court commenced operation in September of last year and has had a really remarkable result. These results are leading the nation, and we should take stock of that.

Of course there is a lot more to be said, and I will of course acknowledge that the Premier made clear less than a week ago that this is a process that deserves a reasonable and fair chance of being part of a national approach on the issue. There are key benefits in a national approach on this issue. For example, a nationally consistent approach means greater consistency in our laws with our border states – we know just how much border issues do affect the Victorian community – and more uniform approaches to the application of these laws by our judges. A national approach on the age of criminal responsibility was a key discussion at the most recent meeting of the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General in December last year. An outcome from that meeting, as I understand it, was for the national age of criminal responsibility working group to undertake further work to consider the need for adequate supports and services for children who are exhibiting offending behaviour, which again reflects on the need to ensure support for young offenders, which really is at the very crux of the issue that we are debating in this bill before us.

The Premier has, however, made clear that we will not hesitate to take our own approach, and that is very important – that we will not hesitate for a moment to take our own approach if a nationally consistent approach cannot be implemented. This will not, however, be done without ensuring we closely consult with expert stakeholders and partners in the youth justice system who are at the very front line of this issue. Again, whilst I acknowledged Tiana, I will say that there are so very many more that are doing just such exceptional work on behalf of the community at large but also the future generations of young people, who deserve nothing short of our absolute commitment to this issue.

Aiv PUGLIELLI (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (16:45): I would like to thank Ms Watt for her contribution. It is really important that across this chamber we collaborate to truly address this issue. I am speaking today in support of the Children, Youth and Families Amendment (Raise the Age) Bill 2022. First Nations organisations and medical, legal and human rights bodies are calling on the government to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to at least 14 years old. Change the Record, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services, Amnesty Australia, the Law Council of Australia, the Australian Medical Association and the UN are all calling for this change.

I spoke last month about the profound injustice that is the incarceration of children in Victoria. The imprisonment of children is not only in conflict with the best available evidence from experts but it flies in the face, frankly, of everyday morality. As a community we have a duty to listen to First Nations people who are crying out for justice reform, including raising the age of criminal responsibility. Youth incarceration affects First Nations children and communities more acutely than any others. Aboriginal people aged 10 to 17 are only 5.8 per cent of their cohort in the population, yet they represent 49 per cent of children in prison. They are jailed at almost 22 times the rate of non-Indigenous young people. We have an opportunity now to try and undo this harm. Raising the age to 14 is one of the most direct and straightforward tools that we have to reduce the number of Aboriginal children in prison.

Our youth correctional system is far from rehabilitative. We know that children are regularly subject to, for example, solitary confinement. This is a barbaric practice that has been condemned by international human rights groups. A report by the Victorian Ombudsman found that:

Young people were often separated for weeks in circumstances where there appeared to be little or no ongoing risk of harm to others; victims were separated for the same time as perpetrators, sometimes for months; and good behaviour did not appear to result in less separation.

There is no logic to this. This is institutional cruelty, plain and simple. We have known for decades that during childhood children’s brains are still developing and are thus vulnerable to developmental delay. Solitary confinement has devastating impacts on neurological development. It triggers cognitive deficits, even hallucinations, and stunts the growth of the frontal lobes of the brain. Just the experience of being alone in a room for 22 hours a day is terrifying for these children. A whistleblower at the Parkville youth justice centre revealed that boys in solitary confinement were threatening to kill themselves just in order to be put on surveillance so they would have someone to talk to. I think we should all collectively be ashamed that this is happening in Victoria.

According to the Victorian Sentencing Advisory Council’s 2016 report, 94 per cent of children in detention aged 10 to 12 returned to prison before they were 18. Again, the incarceration of children does nothing to rehabilitate people. It is a system of punishment. If we want young people to be set on a path to learn and to grow from their mistakes, it is in their best interests that they are kept as far away from this system as possible. They need to be with their families in their communities. There is overwhelming community support to raise the age to at least 14 – that is the international, UN-endorsed standard. It is what First Nations people have been crying out for. We cannot let politics get in the way of children’s welfare. We need to have the courage to listen to the experts. It is time to raise the age to 14.

Tom McINTOSH (Eastern Victoria) (16:49): I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this. I rise to contribute to the debate on the Children, Youth and Families Amendment (Raise the Age) Bill 2022. The purpose of the bill is to raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility in Victoria from 10 to 14 years old by amending section 344 of the Children, Youth and Families Act 2005. Children in custody should be an absolute last resort. I think everyone in this chamber agrees with that sentiment, and this is an issue that the government takes very seriously. There is broad agreement in the direction towards raising the age of criminal responsibility, but there are several options, including safeguards, that are crucially important for the reforms to succeed. The criminal justice system is a last resort in a long line of features of the safety net in our community for all people, including young people and children. No-one, especially young people and children, should be incarcerated in our state unless there is overwhelming evidence that they must be in order to preserve the safety of all Victorians.

Part of why I am interested in this job and being in here – I am a big believer of better outcomes for our community, for individuals and for families – is obviously to see each generation have a better quality of life than the one before it, and I think if we look over time that is occurring. But when it comes to individuals having healthier, happier, better quality lives, for me removing trauma is a massive part of that. We have seen for so long – it is not always the case but it is very often the case, and our Indigenous peoples, our First Nations people, are a very good example of this – that people who have suffered through so much, from removal from their lands, loss of culture, racism and outright atrocious things that happened, have this built-in, locked-in trauma and inequality. We see things like a lack of equity around housing. Around Australia 70 per cent of the general population own their own home or are paying it off. Yet it is the flip side for our Indigenous people: we are looking at 70 per cent who do not own their own home or are not paying it off. So I will just take this opportunity to touch on the fact that this year as we get ready to vote on the Voice, I will absolutely be voting yes and campaigning for a yes vote. I just think, as we have this conversation – and obviously so many, particularly Indigenous kids, are part of this conversation – I just wanted to touch on that.

That equity point is a real thing for me, because it is that equity of a home in a family – I will shortly talk more about the journey of life that we all have – that sets up the family, the generations coming through and future generations for success. That home is where so much can be built from. I think that equity is a real point because then you can support future generations to have their own homes, which takes stress off. If they look to have families of their own, there is a family home to come back to that allows them to purchase their own home and so on.

But just coming back to the trauma side of things, this is a pretty important one to me. I come from Ballarat. We have seen a lot of trauma occur there over the last 50 to 70-plus years, and you see it embedded into generations. That is so much of the work that the Andrews Labor government of Victoria has committed to and is well on the way to doing – to try and remove that generational trauma. I think as part of this conversation for me it is really important to reflect upon what leads to some of the outcomes that we are talking about. I know myself sometimes the situation that a lot of kids are born into is incredibly hard for them to get out of. I have been a foster carer myself as part of my belief in that generational change, and through that experience I have seen just amazing, amazing kids – some in more challenging circumstances than others but all good kids, with some ending up down different paths to others.

So I think the support that we can put around families and parents and children that are particularly challenged – and again, I will come back to and talk about the investment we are making to do that – is just so important. Coming back to the Ballarat example that I spoke about in my first speech in here, having lost half a dozen good mates to suicide, you look at that family trauma that is just so embedded and so difficult to remove and whether there are mental health issues that flow through the family or from events or from drug and alcohol dependencies that are within the family and flow through and eventually play out if an intervention or if support is not received. I think one of the great things we are doing as a community, as a government, is to be breaking the stigma around mental health issues and to be having those conversations. I am particularly passionate about men’s mental health for the reasons I have just described. That is six good mates; it does not even include others I played footy with or worked with or whatever. There are another half a dozen there. It is those conversations that then enable people to access the support and the services that the investment of government allows. But within community the values that we have, the ways we talk to each other, the ways we love each other, our families, friends, whatever those networks are that create that community – which should be, at its best, an unbreakable mesh of community to support each other – then allow people to reach out to the services of government, which hopefully, in an ideal world, people will less and less need to access.

From the point of a child being born into a family, the support that is offered through our brilliant maternal childcare support into early education – you have all heard me stand up a number of times and speak about early education. I am really passionate about it because, as we know, the huge amount of development that is happening in a child’s brain in those first five, six, seven years of life is just so fundamental to not only their academic but, to me, more importantly, emotional wellbeing throughout their life. That is why you will hear me get up and talk again and again about that. From early education into our school system, I think more and more we are viewing primary school – again, like we have just talked about with early education – as increasingly aware of that emotional side of things, setting people up with those emotional skill sets to thrive and do well in life. But then I think, as we go through that really tumultuous time – and particularly I will speak a bit more from seeing young men around me, who I was friends with at the time, going through that age of teenagers into an early working life – I think it is for us to acknowledge that we need a lot of different models to suit a lot of different people.

That is why I am delighted that our government has invested so heavily in TAFE. If we think about people that are coming out of situations that are extremely challenging and who perhaps had a far more complex start to life than others, university may not be where they are going to end up. I worked in construction for 10 years, and I am very proud that in Australia we have construction and trades – manufacturing, other jobs and a whole lot of jobs in the service industry as well – where people can be paid well, and it does not depend on the start they have had in life or their academic capacity. Where they find themselves, they can still be active in our society and build their own family but be paid well enough to buy a home, whatever challenges they have had – to take the step. If they want to have a family, do that, and then have the government supports around for them and their children to go on and hopefully have a more fulfilling life, which comes back to where I started this: about reducing those levels of trauma. Sometimes people might look at construction workers and think, ‘Oh, they’re a bit of a smelly lot. They’re not clean and they’re not washed and whatnot.’

I am incredibly proud; I will give you an example. I mentioned in my first speech a young Colombian woman I was speaking to. She and her husband were out from Columbia. She was just so delighted that someone without a degree could earn good money and fully participate, from an economic perspective, in our society. And that says it all for me about the benefit of transitioning from the family unit into early education and continuing our education and training and skills to then be able to go into jobs that are going to pay someone well, set them up, set their family up and set their kids up for a better life than what they have had. We see particularly in recent decades, maybe the last 50 years, migrant families and the incredible work they have done to set up the next generation of their family, absolutely working day and night to ensure their family have a better go of things. I just wanted to touch on all those things because it is a very fundamental reason as to why I am in this role and why I want to be here.

I suppose of the things I have not really touched on that also make up everything else that contributes to a person’s life a big one is community sport and hobbies. I think it can be easy to not take seriously enough the value of those things. Most understand, but a small percentage of people question why we would invest in community sport and community activities. I think it is very, very simple because, as I was speaking about earlier, community is that mesh that supports us all, through sport and through activity, and helps with not only physical health but mental health. Those community bonds are just absolutely crucial to a person’s wellbeing.

The other thing I should touch on, which would be remiss of me not to mention, is the work that is going on in our mental health sector. There are incredible people doing incredible work, and it is really tough. I think a benefit of us being able to have the conversations and break through the stigma is people reaching out, because we obviously have this demand that is growing for people to be able to understand and deal with whatever emotional or mental issues they may have. But by doing this, not only are we potentially, or very likely, saving their lives but we are removing the potential for trauma to be passed on to the next generation. I take this opportunity to thank everyone that works particularly anywhere in the mental health or family services and supports area, because it is incredibly, incredibly difficult work. It is one thing for us to stand here and fight for the funding for those positions to exist but another to get up every morning and go and do that work and make the lives of Victorian children, parents and families – whatever it might be – better to try and prevent the outcomes that we are talking about here today.

They are the outcomes that we do not want to see – that is, anyone being incarcerated. We do not want anyone’s (a) actions or (b) outcome to result in that, because we are just talking about going back into that cycle again. I am proud the government has done so much good work. The minister was talking this morning during question time about the work the government is successfully doing to break that cycle.

Lee TARLAMIS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:05): I move:

That debate on this bill be adjourned until the next day of meeting.

Motion agreed to and debate adjourned until next day of meeting.