Achi news desk-
This week, the Victorian government went back on a promise to make bail laws fairer for children, weakened its commitment to raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility to 14, and announced it will trial electronic monitoring of children on bail.
It was a bad week for those of us who work to help children have the opportunity to build good lives and make communities stronger and safer. But the question also arose: who exactly runs justice policy in Victoria — our Parliament or our police?
The reality of crime statistics
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are over-policed and over-imprisoned in Victoria, and these new measures from the Allan government will undermine that disadvantage.
Over the past 20 years, the crime rate in Victoria has been on a downward trend, and during the COVID lockdowns there was a noticeable drop. Crime rates are at historic lows — there has rarely been a safer time or place to live. That’s why those who want to create scare campaigns about supposed crime rates always talk in percentages, given that the raw numbers are so low, that even small variations are read as big changes.
Children who engage in criminal behavior have extremely complex issues that the government and society fail to help them with. Almost all Aboriginal children who come into contact with the legal system have been in contact with the child protection system since they were three years old or younger. For most of them, this will involve spending time in residential care before coming into contact with the criminal justice system.
Given that the government has 10 years to help these children through the child protection system, why are we obsessed with punishing the child, rather than holding child protection and the government to account for not helping them ? Why is the child labeled as the problem, the failure, the issue to be addressed, while the system gets off scot-free?
Many of these children who offend will have one or more cognitive impairments and other health conditions which are likely to be undiagnosed or untreated. They are more likely to have been expelled from school or disengaged from their education.
When a child doesn’t have the opportunity to grow up in a stable home with a stable income, when a child doesn’t get the health care or education they deserve, why are we so ready to punish them and hiding in a prison?
Age of responsibility and surety
This Victorian government made a clear promise to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14 by 2027. It promised to lead the nation on this reform, but it is already falling behind other jurisdictions and appears to be devoting itself to completely to their previous promise. .
Last week, Victorian Attorney General Jaclyn Symes said on ABC Radio that the government’s previous commitment to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14 would be subject to the results of an “alternative service model” to be implemented.
When pressed that this was different from the promise of former chief elder Dan Andrews, Smyes said, “We are doing the work to get the alternative service model right.”
Children also still face the same bail tests as adults in Victoria. The Allan government promised to change that by creating a specific bail test for children that would be fairer. It would have recognized that children have a strong chance of rehabilitation if they can obtain stable housing, be reconnected with education and health care, and—for Aboriginal children—be reconnected with community and culture.
Forcing children to continue to face the same bail test as adults means that many will never have the opportunity to be rehabilitated, and will be stuck in the criminal justice system for life.
Electronic monitoring of children will have the same effect. It will be extremely stigmatizing and prevent their chances of being reconnected with the support they need or to be reconnected with culture and community.
For aboriginal children, there are many community-run Aboriginal organizations that do their best to run support services for them and their families, to try to pick up the pieces where the government has failed. But our organizations are continually underfunded by government and stuck in continuous “pilot” cycles. We simply do not have the resources to help all of our children all the time.
Instead of investing more money in Aboriginal organizations and communities so that our people can decide for themselves the best solutions for our children, the Allan government has chosen to invest in policing our children and imprisoning our children even more than the they already do it. This contradicts his own policy of “self-determination”, the obligations he entered into in the national Closing the Gap agreement, and the truths he allegedly told the Yoorrook Justice Commission.
Considering that everyone knows what support these children need, all that is needed is for the government to fund them properly. For our communities, the over-policing and over-incarceration of our people has long roots back to Stolen Generation policies, assimilation, and the genocide of our people. By breathing new life into this colonial legacy, Allan’s government is jeopardizing the Treaty.
I want Premier Jacinta Allan to be the first leader to sign an Agreement in this nation, but the announcements made by her government this week will make this much more difficult than it already was. I hope she owns up to these decisions as a mistake and reverses them before they are implemented.
