A couple of weeks ago, the ABC released this reimagining of the classic Quantus ad.
I've presents like Ball from Carbontic Cleveland Sumps like Gunland film.
It's a confronting reminder that in Australia, children as young as ten years old are behind bars. It comes as more than one hundred countries have questioned Australia at the United Nations on our record of locking up kids, the overwhelming majority of whom are Indigenous. For a nation that claims moral leadership on human rights, the scrutiny now facing Australia is deeply shameful and impossible to ignore. The tough
on crime agendas. Are several states and territory governments risk undermining Australia's reputation when it comes to the way we treat our own children. I'm Daniel James and you're listening to seven AM today. CEO Changed the Record Jade Lane and CEO of Human Rights Law Center, Caitlin Raga on Australia standing on the world stage and why so many Australian children call prison home. It's Monday, February two. Jade,
thanks for joining us. I'm sure you weren't surprised that forty countries are calling on Australia to raise the age of criminal responsibility. So how many kids are locked up in Australia and who are they?
Yeah, so, at the moment, our First Nations kids make up the majority of kids that are in Australia ages ten to seventeen. So we've got alarmingly in Queensland and Northern Territory ninety to ninety nine percent of the kids that are in lock up our First nation's children. There's no sign that these numbers are going to stop because as we progress with these harsh on crime and harsh on youth crime laws, it's just going to keep increasing.
Children need to face consequences when they do the wrong thing. If you violate the sanctity of someone's home, can you break in and rob them?
Well atult crime atult time.
I believe very strongly that the police need every tool in their toolkit to address youth crime to make sure that they can reduce.
Why are there so many Aboriginal Entaristraatetland to teach in prison?
Yeah, I think it's a great question and one that you know, people need to start having a discussion about. We know that you know, children aren't inherently bad any child in reality, it is because these sort of racist and archaic laws are targeting our children. We know our children are over surveillanced and over policed and they are ultimately being criminalized just for being children and for being First Nations children.
Eighty percent of the kids locked up haven't even been So how does that happen?
Yeah, well, I mean the simple answer to that is they're being arbitrarily detained and we know that this is a violation of their human rights, you know, and the UN sent out a delegation, So Australia actually had a delegation from the UN visit us very recently on arbitrary detention of people in Australia. There's a huge majority of children sitting in prison on remand and for an extended
period of time. The UN delegation actually went to visit the Northern Territory and you remember this, our federal government invited them here and the Northern Territory actually refused to allow them access to the detention centers, which I think speaks volumes.
The United Nations has suspended its anti torture mission to Australia after its inspectors were refused entry at several jails. Now the inspectors needed to visit detention facilities to monitor and prevent brutality.
It's quite embarrassing and humiliating for Australia being some of the only countries that have ever refused to allow a UN delegation access to have a look of facilities.
And this u N review also heard evidence from the UN Committee Against Torture. What are you hearing personally from children and from families about the conditions of that some of these kids are facing in some of these places.
Yeah, I mean it is horrific you think about children as young as ten being placed into these really you know, just clinical, awful settings.
And I've heard.
Stories from children about being left in darkness for days. Anyone that has children, you know, children go to bed cuddling a toy, they want a door open, they don't like the dark and our children are being left in the darkness for days. And that's first hand accounts from children and from workers as well.
So they're the conditions that the kids face. What about kids being separated or segregated from society, excluded from community and culture, what does that separation do them?
Yeah, and I mean I think this is a great point to touch on in terms of how these laws are passing at the moment, which completely ignore any evidence. The Royal Australian College of Physicians and so many other experts can tell you that this is not going to help children, not only separating them from society generally, but particularly for First Nations children who are then excluded from
accessing their culture, their community and being on country. The deepening of the harm and the trauma that that extends to them is just beyond measurable. It's a cycle that then impacts them for the rest of their lives. And we know that in the evidence, if the child comes into contact with the castural system early in their life, they're more than likely going to come back into contact with it again.
So what does an alternative to that look like to stop the cycle?
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, First Nations people and communities have had the solutions for many, many years. There's lots of different community initiatives and this is kind of what also makes the detention of these children arbitrary because where there are other alternatives, why would you go to lock them up as a first response? We're kind of facing this embedded stolen generation's approach to protectionism of our children, which is totally unneeded and unnecessary.
And finally, Jada, questioning two parts, how a shame should Australia be to be called out the world stage in this way? And do you think Australia is actually capable of feeling shame when it comes to this issue.
I mean, particularly as a country that seems to present itself and a lot of its citizens consider Australia to be a champion of human rights, to be at the forefront of protecting and upholding human rights, incredibly incredibly shameful. Surely, the measure of your humanity is how you treat your children, and at the moment in our society, our children are being treated very poorly. You know, we've mentioned torture, we've mentioned detaining children as young as ten and throwing them
in prison. There is room to act. Our federal government can act on these things very easily.
They have the power.
It would be as simple as legislating some national minimum standards around youth justice and raising the age being obviously the number one and easiest thing that they could do nationally.
Jade, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much.
Coming up how the States youth crime obsession is making things worse Caitlin. Last week Australia front of the UN in Geneva to defend its human rights obligations in front of one hundred and twenty countries and they pointed to our record of locking up children and indigenous people. So how did it unfold?
So this is a process that runs every four and a half years where every member of the UN goes before the Human Rights Council in Geneva and has its human rights record examined by its peers. So it's called the Universal Periodic Review. This is Australia's fourth time going through the process and really it's a look at how much we are actually implementing in our domestic law and policy at home the obligations that we've signed up up
to internationally to protect people's rights. Australia has a fairly good record of signing up to the international treaties, but there's a big gap sometimes between what actually then happens in terms of implementing those into our domestic law.
However, Germany remains concerned that criminal responsibility starts at only ten years of age and almost all Australian states and territories. Furthermore, Germany is concerned about Australia's continued use of offshore processing in order to address a regular immigration.
So we've got a bit of a dressing down at the UN. How did Australia respond to that dressing down?
Well, it's a very un dressing down. Very constructive dialogue is the official term for it. So it's really focused on recommendations of what we can do to improve our record. But underlying that, of course is the suggestion that we're not meeting our responsibilities currently and the things that came out that many countries were then asking the probe questions about First Nations rights being the top of the list, our treatment of asylum seekers and particularly the use of
offshore processing for people arriving in the country. Gender based violence came out. They were the really dominant thing.
Take further measures to ensure that all cases of gender based violence, particularly against Indigenous women and girls, are investigating perpetrators.
Held the condess the overrepresentation of First Nations people in prisons, including by identifying.
Probably the other piece that has to underpin all of this, and that is one of our clearest failings and gaps is that we don't have clear legal human rights protections in Australia. I don't have a federal human Rights Act and that was repeatedly called out by a number of countries.
Estonia recommends to Australia to one enact a national Human Rights Act to raise thee of criminal responsibility to at least fourteen years with old exceptions in load with international but.
Within that also child rights, so particularly the age of criminal responsibility and the fact that we still lock up ten year olds which disproportionately overlaps then with First Nations communities.
How do we compare to other countries when it comes to incarcerating children.
We are well behind most other comparative liberal democracies. You know, fourteen is really the absolute minimum that children should be held criminally responsible under human rights law. And the fact that we have most jurisdictions around Australia well below that, going down to ten even twelve, and we don't have this protected even at the federal level, so we are
an outlier in this regard. The Australian government will work closely with states and territories to consider any recommendations that fall within their constitutional responsibility, and.
Part of Australia's defense when it comes to criminal laws and the criminal justice system in particular, was to point to the responsibility of states and territories in that role. Is that a fair session to make.
That was definitely part of the government delegations explanation and response was the complexity of our federal system under international law that is utterly irrelevant. Many countries have federal jurisdictions, but your obligation as an entire nation state under your human rights law obligations are to make sure that this
is implemented. So it really does mean that these responsibilities to uphold people's rights flow through from the federal government who has the power to make the treaties, but they go through consultation processes with the states before they do that, and the states then also have a responsibility to ensure that Australia is complying with its responsibilities, but ultimately to making sure that it's protecting everybody's human rights. So it's
not a defense in any way. It actually shows that those obligations flow all the way through to all levels of government in the country.
The UN says Australia should adopt a human rights Act. How would that work?
Well, it's not just the UN Human Rights Council that's saying that, it's also the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights that did an extensive consultation and review about eighteen months ago. The first recommendation was to implement a federal Human Rights Act. So far the government has not yet responded to that Committee inquiry report. It's the missing piece
in our foundational legal structure, in our overall framework. We don't have anything at national level that binds that all together in terms of making sure that all public decision makers take into account before they make their decisions, whether that's to introduce new laws or policies or service delivery, about how will this impact on people's rights and if people's rights are going to be restricted, then that needs to be balanced and done in a proportionate and appropriate way,
not done on the fly, not done at hoc. And we only have that currently in Victoria the Act and Queensland that do have human Rights acts in place. So that's really what's missing and it would be the obvious next step for the Urban Ezic government to take.
So the federal government doesn't have a plan to bring in a human Rights Act at this particular time on a state level, that we have also seen the popularity of reforms like tougher bail laws at old time for
adult crime. So how do we bust out of this spiral we get ourselves into when it comes to locking children up, reinforcing patterns of detention for young people in particular, how do we bust ourselves out of that cycle when there is no political will, particularly at the state and territory level to do so.
Look, I mean, law and order politics are definitely something that we're seeing take hold in so many places, and they're easy, they're easy and lean into where people's conserve and fears are. But at the same time, we know
that they don't actually make communities safer. And the point of having these sort of human rights legal frameworks is that human rights actually gives us a guidance and a roadmap for how to find the right balance and not doing knee jerk responses after something terrible has happened, which is what led to Victoria's vail laws, for example, being
drastically tightened up. Contrary to human rights, it's more a question of political priority at the moment and the concerns people have in the community at the moment, around cost of living, around housing crisis, around racism, around not feeling engaged. They all connect to human rights principles and so really human rights is about everyone has the right to education, to a habitable house, to a decent standard of living, and really it's about connecting and showing that these are
the issues that Australians actually care about. They are things that have been highlighted in Royal commissions, from robodebt to aged care, to disability and human rights actually provides a framework for guiding whichever government is in power on how to respond to that in a way that takes people's concerns seriously.
Caitlin, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Also in the news, Queensland Senator Matt Canavan says he won't be challenging David Little Proud for the Nationals leadership. A spill is expected to take place today after Rogue Natz and p Column Boyce announced plans to put his
name forward for the top drop. Boyce accepts he doesn't have the numbers to win, but insists both Little Proud and Liberal leader Susan Lee need to go in order for the parties to rebuild and criminals will no longer be able to leverage glowing character references to reduce their sentences. Under changes of being introduced in New South Wales this week, the state will become the first in the country to prevent good character been considered during sentencing hearings for all
criminal offenses. The move has been heralded by survivors of sexual abuse as a monumental shift. I'm Daniel James. You'll be listening to seven AM. We'll be back tomorrow.