Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I seek to comment on the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission annual reports for 2020-21 and 2021-22. We must commend the Australian Institute of Criminology for high-quality, impartial and factual statistical reports and especially commend their statistical reports on Indigenous deaths in custody. If we want solutions to our country's problems, we have to deal with facts—hard data. With deaths in custody, the data shows there's no sudden or worsening crisis. The rate of deaths in custody has been steady for 20 years—at around half its peak in the early 1990s. These are indisputable data from the Australian Institute of Criminology, the government agency tasked especially with monitoring deaths in custody.

Adjusted for population, non-Indigenous prisoners were twice as likely to die in prison as Indigenous prisoners. Yes, you heard that right: non-Indigenous prisoners are twice as likely to die in prison than Indigenous prisoners are. Due to the small numbers, deaths in police custody fluctuate from year to year. The data on Indigenous deaths in police custody per Indigenous population has drastically reduced since the 1990s and has remained steady at this far lower rate for nearly 20 years—two decades. The real crisis is of male deaths in prison. On a population adjusted basis, in the last reported year, men were 60 per cent more likely to die in prison than women.

Activists have previously pointed to the total number of deaths in custody over decades to implicitly denigrate the police and prison staff as white supremacists who just want to kill Indigenous people. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the statistics that have been published every year for decades show our prisons are going to great effort to avoid Indigenous deaths in custody—much more than they are doing for the non-Indigenous. The problem certainly is not racism in our custody system. We must remember that these deaths-in-custody statistics include things like deaths from natural causes, deaths in motor vehicle pursuits by police, suicides and other arguably unrelated issues. All these are included in the total numbers.

Now, we do have a problem. There are far too many Indigenous people in our prison system for the proportion of the Australian population that they represent. This is the result of decades of virtue-signalling politicians, like the uncaring Greens, voting for policies that do nothing to help remote and Indigenous communities—decades of dishonest, negligent, uncaring neglect creating victims, robbing them of personal responsibility and depriving them of hope. These virtue-signalling policies have only transferred taxpayer money to the Indigenous industry of white and black consultants, lawyers, activists and rent-seekers who care more about their salaries and perpetuating their jobs than about the communities they supposedly represent.

The Voice to Parliament is just the next policy on this long list of 'look good and do nothing' policies that will not help anyone except bureaucrats in the Canberra bubble. We thank and appreciate the Australian Institute of Criminology. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.