Matt Keogh (Burt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Many in this place, and many Australians, are familiar with the Beatitudes, some of which include, 'Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted,' 'Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled,' and, 'Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.' Then there is the hardly unique notion that we should treat each other as we ourselves wish to be treated. Bearing these in mind, I want to relate a reasonably famous parable.

A man was trapped in his house during a flood. He began praying to God to rescue him. He had a vision in his head of God's hand reaching down from heaven and lifting him to safety. The water started to rise in his house. His neighbour urged him to leave and offered him a ride to safety. The man yelled back, "I am waiting for God to save me." The neighbour drove off in his pick-up truck.

The man continued to pray and hold on to his vision. As the water began rising in his house, he had to climb up to the roof. A boat came by with some people heading for safe ground. They yelled at the man to grab a rope they were ready to throw and take him to safety. He told them that he was waiting for God to save him. They shook their heads and moved on.

The man continued to pray, believing with all his heart that he would be saved by God. The flood waters continued to rise. A helicopter flew by and a voice came over a loudspeaker offering to lower a ladder and take him off the roof. The man waved the helicopter away, shouting back that he was waiting for God to save him. The helicopter left. The flooding water came over the roof and caught him up and swept him away. He drowned.

When he reached heaven and asked, "God, why did you not save me? I believed in you with all my heart. Why did you let me drown?" God replied, "I sent you a pick-up truck, a boat and a helicopter and you refused all of them. What else could I possibly do for you?"

This is where we come in, for it is my view that it is the role of us, as parliamentarians, and the role of government to provide support to those who need it, to look after our neighbour.

It is in this light that I turn to a speech given by the Minister for Social Services at the National Press Club recently. In that speech he spoke about the proportion of those who are young carers, young parents and young students relying on support from our welfare system who will subsequently rely on welfare payments at some future point in their lives or, indeed, for the rest of their lives. The minister spoke about how the welfare system was a failure because it was not acting to stop these people from developing a welfare dependency. The fundamental problem with this approach is that it is confusing cause and effect. Indeed, as famously used by the great President Jed Bartlett in The West Wing, the minister has fallen into the fallacious logic of post hoc ergo procter hoc—after it, therefore because of it.

It is not the case that the welfare system is creating dependency on welfare by these and other groups but rather that there is a complete lack of investment in the social issues that these people confront, both the issues they confront when they are carers, young parents or students as well as those they may face later in life. The problem that this creates is much greater than merely the subsequent reliance on the welfare system. Chronic underinvestment in the social issues in society is costing our society in many ways. The really sad part about this is how obvious an approach it represents.

We hear from those in health all the time about the idea that prevention is better than the cure, yet we continue to increase our spending, year after year, on law enforcement, policing, courts and imprisonment—the consequences of crime—not to mention the cost to the victim and society at large, but we do not come close to matching it in spending designed to prevent crime from occurring in the first place. We see the effects of this, in particular, when we look at those cohorts of Australians that face some of the greatest barriers and disadvantage, reliance on welfare and their interactions with the criminal justice system. In particular, we see it for Aboriginal Australians, who make up only three per cent of the national population and yet in 1991 made up 14 per cent of our nation's prison population, which by 2015 had increased to 27 per cent. Rates of incarceration for Indigenous Australians are 16 times higher than for non-Indigenous Australians; 48 per cent of the juvenile prison population are Aboriginal. ABS figures show that nearly three-quarters of Aboriginal prisoners had a prior adult imprisonment under sentence, compared with just under half of non-Aboriginal prisoners. The system clearly is not working.

We cannot and should not sit idly by. But what are the causes of these disproportionate incarceration rates and the crime leading to them? While I am pleased to say that the government has referred an inquiry to the Australian Law Reform Commission to examine the factors leading to the overrepresentation of Indigenous Australians in prison, it is not the law that is the sole or, in many ways, even the predominant cause of crime and imprisonment, especially amongst Aboriginal Australians. The causes include stolen generations: those taken away from their families as a child at twice as likely to be arrested as their peers. They include differential treatment by law enforcement: Aboriginal people are 15 times more likely to be charged for swearing or offensive behaviour than the rest of the community. They include social and economic situation: poverty and unemployment, particularly for young Aboriginal people or in rural and remote areas, sometimes described as crimes of need, are the very things that saw the need to establish the Australian penal colonies in the first place. Then there is inadequate legal representation, a lack of language skills and foetal alcohol syndrome. The causes include health problems, which we see in life expectancy and in overall health being linked to prison and incarceration. There is family breakdown and violence. As Queensland barrister Cathy McLennan has pointed out:

You can do whatever you like …

But if they’re going home and getting bashed at night, if they’re going home and they are starving, they’re going to reoffend. That is the reality.

There is lack of accommodation: the Children's Court is often being told that imprisonment is the only option because of no safe and stable accommodation being available. There is a lack of community services. According to The Medical Journal of Australia there is increasing evidence that many people in prison are there as a direct consequence of the shortfall in appropriate community-based health and social services, most notably in the areas of housing, mental health and wellbeing, substance use, disability and family violence.

Then there is childhood trauma, where leading experts have observed how lasting and profoundly damaging the effects of trauma on children up to the age of three are, and that in some cases it will result in permanent brain damage connected to adolescent criminal offending. Not only are these issues related to causing crime but, of course, they also drive unemployment and welfare reliance. These are varied and multi-factored, complex issues. I have spoken separately this year about the issue of people requiring assistance with complex issues, and I incorporate those comments here. Essentially though, we need government agencies, state and federal, to work together across and between levels of government to ensure that people do not fall through the cracks and are given the dignity and assistance that they deserve.

But the key point I wish to raise is one that is often raised in respect of the concept of making investments in preventing crime and complex social issues, crime prevention and legal assistance funding from the Commonwealth—the issues that arise from vertical fiscal imbalance. The reality is that while they keep having to fund police, courts and prisons it does not leave much else in state budgets or the capacity to fund well-directed programs targeted at social improvement and inclusion that would assist in reducing crime. But, wait! Why would the federal government spend money on social services and intervention when the savings will be realised by the states, as crime reduces, not having to spend as much on the outcomes of crime. It turns out that the Minister for Social Services might have been inadvertently onto something. Yes, if the Commonwealth properly invests in addressing the causes of crime, not only will you start to reduce the requirement of many having to rely on welfare, but they will also become employed earners paying income tax. There is even a name for this policy concept: justice reinvestment, or, as it is known by some, social reinvestment. While his logic is a bit flawed I am going to choose to believe that the minister's Try, Test and Learn Fund is essentially designed to support such a justice reinvestment approach. The irony of this, given the minister's track record as the WA state Attorney-General is notable, but I will save that for another day.

The Closing the Gap strategy, introduced through COAG by the Rudd government, also goes a long way in promoting such an approach. However, despite the interrelationship between the areas addressed by that strategy, and its goals, and the over-representation of Aboriginal people in Australia's prisons there is a justice gap component to the strategy. No focus on dealing directly with the over-representation of Aboriginal Australians in our prisons, and yet not dealing with that issue prevents us from dealing with the other areas of focus for the strategy, as well. We have had the Senate inquiry, we have the evidence and we have the community support and yet all we hear from state governments are the typical law and order mantras, repeating tired slogans and policies that clearly are not working. If you want an old slogan how about this: instead of just being tough on crime, also be tough on the causes of crime, as Labor called for at the last election. I implore this government to work with all states, local governments and community organisations to bring about a true nation-reaching, grass-roots-active justice reinvestment approach before we lose more people to recidivism, crime and intergenerational welfare dependency.

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