Wednesday, 1 May 2024

 Sarah MANSFIELD (Western Victoria) (16:49): I rise today to speak on one of the last reports tabled by Victoria’s outgoing Ombudsman, Deborah Glass, which was an investigation into healthcare provision for Aboriginal people in Victorian prisons. It was her 10th report on prisons. During her tenure she averaged one investigation into the carceral system every year. Among a number of findings, observations by healthcare providers and advocates and recommendations for action, the Ombudsman declared that only providing mainstream health services to incarcerated First Nations communities is ‘improperly discriminatory’.

This government’s own policies acknowledge that First Nations people have better health outcomes when they are afforded culturally safe health care by Aboriginal-controlled health organisations. The evidence of this has been out there for a long time. After a series of truth-telling hearings in 2023, Yoorrook’s report into Victoria’s child protection and criminal justice systems told of evidence from Aboriginal people in prisons who had experienced significant delays in being able to see a doctor, a dentist or a mental health practitioner and had been denied medical care and medication. We know all too well the consequences of not providing adequate health care to First Nations people in prison – the shamefully high number of Aboriginal deaths in custody in this state.

In the investigation into Veronica Nelson’s passing, the coroner found that had the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody’s recommendations been successfully implemented by the government, Veronica would likely not have died. As the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service noted:

… Veronica’s death was preventable …

She could have been saved by one of the people in charge who she asked to help her. She needed to go to hospital and could have been saved by something as simple as an intravenous drip.

The coroner recommended that prison health care should be equivalent to that available outside of prison and, fundamentally, that Aboriginal people should have access to culturally appropriate health care. Once again, we have the same recommendations to government in the form of the Ombudsman’s report. All of these recommendations received the following response from the Department of Justice and Community Safety: accepted in principle, noting that implementation would be reliant on funding.

I am not sure how many more recommendations of this kind need to be made. How many more times will the government support these pleas in principle only to say, ‘Sorry, we don’t have enough money’? In the words of Deborah Glass:

Government commitments to self-determination, consultation and evidence-based health policy appear to stop at the prison gates.

The government needs to work with First Nations communities and their Aboriginal-controlled health organisations to seriously overhaul this system. The time for accepting recommendations ‘in principle’ is over. The time for direct action, backed by funding, is now.