Sue Lines (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is not often that I stand up here with a good news story, but today I do have a good news story. It is about Save the Children, who run a fantastic program in Armadale. As some people in this place know, I went to Armadale High School, so it is an area I know well. I lived in suburbs around there for quite a long time. Save the Children have been running a an intervention project at Armadale, working with children and young teenagers to stop these kids from getting into trouble with the law and ending up in juvenile detention. Why are they doing that? Sadly, in 2016 a report identified that one in four of the kids in juvenile detention in the Perth area were from that southern corridor. The report went on to further identify that almost 50 per cent of those young kids who end up in juvenile detention reoffend and end up back in the system—and so begins a cycle of youth detention and then jail. Of course many of these kids are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids, and indeed many of them are local Noongar kids.

Save the Children has been running an intervention program out in Armadale for a very long time. It did it initially under an initiative that the Rudd-Gillard government put in place, where funds were directed to intervention. Of course we all remember that horrific first budget of Mr Abbott in 2014, and those funds were slashed—overnight they were gone. The intervention program that Save the Children was running encouraged kids to come in off the streets and play basketball and get involved. Save the Children works in a partnership—talking to kids, talking to their parents, talking to local elders about what they want to see in their local area, and also respecting the point of view that they bring. Governance is by local Noongar elders and also young people who are emerging leaders. It really is a holistic program working in absolute partnership with local people.

What did the Abbott government to do with Save the Children's funding? They put it into cameras. That funding was for working with local kids, keeping them out of detention, and that funding was then put into cameras which really would have led to just picking kids up off the street and putting more of them into detention. Save the Children were presented with this funding crisis and it looked like their project was going to close. I helped them agitate with the Barnett government to put funding into the program, as did the member for Bassendean, Mr Dave Kelly, the shadow minister for youth at the time. Both of us tried to get funding from a range of sources to make sure this very valuable program did not close, but to no avail—our representations fell on the deaf ears of the Barnett government. It was too busy wasting money on iconic programs to look at putting money into where it was needed. We saw the number of kids in detention in WA grow disproportionately. And, of course, we all know the sad and sorry state in Western Australia, and indeed many places across the country, where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids are more likely to end up in youth detention and finish school.

Armadale council came on board, Save the Children put some of their own funding in, and the program hobbled along. Thankfully, the McGowan Labor government was elected this year and one of the first things it has done is commit almost $1 million to that intervention program. I am really pleased to stand here today and say the good work Save the Children is doing up in the Armadale corridor will continue. We really do need to tackle the problem of young people going into detention. We do not want to just lock them up and throw away the keys, because we know that leads to really poor outcomes. We need to actually work in partnership.

I meet regularly with Save the Children. They do wonderful work across the community in Western Australia, as I am sure they do across the country. They did a report a couple of years ago which really sticks in my mind. They interviewed very young children aged from seven upwards. One of the things you often read about when you look at letters page The West Australian is people complaining about young kids mucking up on trains. So what Save the Children did was go out and interview kids who ride the trains between Armadale and Perth. Many of them congregate at Burswood Station, which is my local station, because that is adjacent to Crown Casino. They muck up, as kids do. They get on the trains and they are noisy, and sometimes their behaviour is challenging. So Save the Children gave cameras to those children who ride the train—some of them as young as seven—and asked them to take photos of what was in their neighbourhood, where they spent their time. Out of that, Save the Children produced a book of the kids stories—and it really is horrific. The main reason these kids were riding trains was not to be smart alecs or to show off or to intimidate other people but, very sadly, because it was safer to be on the trains at night than in their homes. Isn't that appalling—safer being on the trains than in their homes! At home, there might have been drug abuse and domestic violence. So these kids saw the trains as a safe haven—somewhere they could get together with their mates. Sure, they muck around; that is what kids do.

The community of Perth were seeing that as antisocial behaviour—and in some aspects it was—but no-one was getting to the root cause of why those children were on the trains. Sadly, Save the Children tried to get money from the state government to position a youth van at Burswood, where most of the kids hang out, and try and get those kids into the Armadale program. Sadly, again, the Barnett government was at that point much more interested in locking up kids than trying to work with them to get them off the trains, working with their families to get them back into a family situation, and respecting that those kids are our future and that working with them is a much better outcome than locking them up.

Mr Kelly, who was still then the shadow youth minister, and I tried hard to get some funding for that program. Again, we were not successful. That is still a program that has merit, and I hope Save the Children still think it is a valuable program to run. I think having a van that can talk kids to get to the issue of what has got them onto the trains and divert them into something safer than riding the trains is a good program. Some of those kids took photos of meth labs. The alarm bells should be ringing for us. It is a publicly available document, beautifully produced, with the kids' stories, but I think very young kids taking a photo of a meth lab and seeing it as part of their everyday environment is shocking. The fact that it is happening in my home state is appalling. I am a southern suburbs person. I grew up in Gosnells. I went to high school in Armadale. I have always lived south of the river. I currently live in Lathlain. I know those suburbs well. I really do hope that we can do something about it, because it troubles me deeply that young kids think that taking a photograph of a meth lab that is part of their community is an okay thing to do.

I commend the McGowan government for providing this money to Save the Children. I know they will do a terrific job. They are already doing a terrific job. I commend the Armadale council, the Gosnells council and the Belmont council for being involved in this youth partnership program in the southern suburbs. I hope that this will be just a small start to ensure that our kids, our southern suburbs kids, stop going into youth detention, stop reoffending and instead have the bright future that they so richly deserve as our future leaders.