The public has had a long held fascination with detectives. Detective see a side of life the average persons never exposed to. I spent thirty four years as a cop. For twenty five of those years I was catching killers. That's what I did for a living. I was a homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead, I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated. The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw
and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some of the content and language might be confronting. That's because no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into this world. Welcome back to part two of my chat with former greenpeace warrior, state politician the current Australian Capital Territory Attorney
General Shane Rattenberry. Welcome back, Shane, Thanks very much. Now, Shane, before we get back talking about crime and solving all the all the issues in the world of crime, You're obviously a very busy person, very driven person. How do you find balance in your life?
I think in a job like I have. It is important to get that balance otherwise you just burn yourself out. So I used to do triathlon. It was a great outlet for me as a young person. Kept me pretty focused as well. And these days I just run. I've got time to do.
That, just run marathons, but I do a bit.
I do trial running. Yah. It's sort of become a really popular sport in Australian so the races are held in beautiful places, you know, the Blue Mountains, national parks, coastal locations. It's a good outlet and I enjoy the training. I usually run by myself in training and running with mates is really fun and social. But because my job's so full on actually having some quiet time just think about things, I actually find it very meditative.
I think I do meditation and I do describe running it can have the same effect because you can just switch off and get lost in your thoughts and don't worry about anything else other than one foot after the other.
And I think for people who've never runners, they think, oh, running must just be painful. But once you get fit enough, you know, and your body's adapted a little bit, you can't just go out for a run and it doesn't hurt. You're just sort of cruising along. And especially in Canberra I live, we've got some nice nature reserve areas and you go out and kangaroos and wildflowers in the spring. It's pretty good for the soul.
Actually, yeah, and you can get lost in that, so let's your balance. You talk triathons, Did you do the Hawaiian Triathlon?
I have done it once. Yeah, that's a tough. Yeah.
Just tell people that don't understand how far you ran, swim and cycle, because.
Yeah, so the I Man in Hawaii it's really hot and humid as well, so the temperature adds a whole lot to it. But it's a three point eight kilometer swim, then one hundred and eighty k's on the bike, and then you jump off and run a marathon. So forty two k's at the end. How'd you feel after that? Pretty poorly? Yeah, yeah, big, it's just a tough day out I've had. I've done the I Man about half a dozen times. Yeah, in various places. I've had some good ones and I've had some bad ones. Yeah. If
you hit the wall, it's long. It's a long day out there, and you st get home for prettyquasy, but if you get it right, it's the most exhilarating thing. And hitting that finish line you've achieved something you never thought you could do. There's an enormous sense of self satisfaction in it of having pushed yourself through some dark moments, get out there and you're like, I just want to stop, I just want to give up, and you keep going. So the thrill of finishing is pretty.
Powerful, and it builds up that resilience, doesn't it. If you put yourself through that sort of pain and that sort of tests that you've got through that so other things that you face you go, okay, well I can manage this.
It's really true. And in some ways, the race day is the fun day. It's the preparation that's hard. Now. I once saw one of the professional triathlets say I love race day because you know, you get out of there, there's people come and cheer for you. It's catered because they have aid stations and things. When you're out training by yourself, they're the long, hard, lonely times. But it does teach your focus and discipline and overcoming hard obstacles.
Yeah, and also you get what you put in like, you can't shortcut your training. You're going to put the kilometers in your legs and get yourself ready for it. Soun't take shortcuts. So it's a good lesson in life, isn't it.
And that's always pena motivation for me in trainings. If I don't do it there, it's going to be a lot worse when you try and do the event later.
Do you try to train early in the morning or.
Yeah, I do, because if otherwise you get in the day and the day takes over and it's a nice peaceful time of day. I guess I've probably become a morning person as a results of it. There's not many people around, the sun's coming up, you know, the birds are out. It's a pretty good time a day to be out there. People who are not mourning people are missing out. I reckon.
I let's not tell two many people because I'm a morning person.
I love it.
You get up, get all your stuff done, do your training, there's no one around, and that then you've got the day ahead of you. I would imagine in politics, like in policing too, if I got my training done in the morning, I didn't care what happened for the rest of the day because I've already had my men time in the training.
It's a perfect description of it. Absolutely.
Now I've also spoken to your staff and I'm not going to name names, and I won't even look in the direction, but they want me to find out seeing this is called I catch kill it. Whether you're a robot, now, if that's a reflection on how hard do you keep your staff going or how hard you work? But how would you answer that if someone said, are you a robot?
I hope not.
No.
Look, I think I have got an ability to keep at it, you know, because I just find the work so interesting and so motivating, and the ability to make a difference does keep you going. And I think I've got a bit of stamina. I think the endurance sports speak to that. But that's you do hit a point sometimes where you've just got to go home, you know. And I do have that real bell and sometimes I just go home at the end of the day and
the work is really intense. And I'm sure you have this experience, well, and you literally you get home, you sit on the couch and you just don't move because you've spent all your not just your physical energy it's the expandite of emotional energy.
You Sometimes I get home, I didn't even have the energy to say hello. You have just drained everything out of you.
And that's part of the sacrifice for the family as well, because you're coming in like, don't talk to me, I just need some quiet time, and they're waiting for you at home. You've been gone a long time, so that you know, that's some of the toll of these kind of roles. You've got kids. I don't know, but I met a part in the later in life. She's got kids and we're now starting to see green kids come along. So that's been a lot of fun for me. And it's a good a good balance.
That's a good experience that that balances you out, doesn't it. You come home and that you've got someone that doesn't care what you've done, that doesn't care that you're under pressure.
And they're hilarious. They're just so much fun.
Good fun. Okay, Well, get back to quite a few topics we've got here. First, nations, people, over representation in the in the prison system. Now, you also had a portfolio Indigenous affairs I did early.
On in my ministry.
Yeah time, yes, yeah, what's your what's your thoughts on that, because it's it's quite confronting.
This is a blight on Australia. The rate of Indigenous incarceration in this country is appalling, and it's we're talking about overrepresentation. You are far more likely now up in jail if you're an Aboriginal Australian then if you are visual Australian, and in the Act, that proportion is actually the highest in the country. Really, that's partly because our rate of imprisonment of non Indigenous people is actually much lower.
When we first built out O Jail, we had a very low rate of imprisonment, and partly I think it's because the judges didn't want to send people away and they kept them in the community. As soon as we have in the jail, the prison rates skyrocketed and in the last five years we've actually managed to bring that back down, but we haven't brought it down as much for Indigenous people, and so that tells me we've got a lot of work still to do. Because the programs
are putting in place are having an effect. They're reducing recidivism, they're cutting the rate of imprisonment, we're giving the judges alternative diversion pathways for people, but they're not working nearly as well for Aboriginal people, and that is saying we've got to do more work on Okay.
Is there when I'm dealing with Aboriginal people? Quite often they say, when people are trying to find solutions for us, why don't they come and ask us, is there anything that's in the pipeline that you think might provide that type of listening, finding out what needs to be done and finding the solution.
Oh, definitely, We've got to have more Aboriginal community controlled organizations. That's the sort of tag you've put on them, but running a lot of our programs, and certainly we are trying to build them up, but we only had a couple in the act. In recent years, we've started to have more come in. They've got some really great ideas on how to support people because the cultural stuff is
so important. It goes right back to the beginning where young Aboriginal people, you know, they've got a distrustful relationship with police for all the historical reasons we know that leads to them coming into contact with the justice system. More often they see a police officer, they give them a bit of lip. The police react like, how dare
you challenge my authority. We've seen the examples that do get captured sometimes unfortunately, and so there's this whole toxic relationship that just escalates and Aboriginal people end up in the system much more the non Aboriginal people.
Yeah, we've I don't know what the answer. It's complex, but it's just the ratio of Indigenous people, First Nations people in their prisons. It's just it's sad.
Yeah. One thing I'm a little bit proud of is in the Act. In the last sort of five years we've seen nationally the increase in Indigenous people in go by about ten percent. We've cut it by five percent. So stuff starting to work, but it's still whatever. We've got a goal to have the rate of imprisonment of Indigenous people the same as non Indigenous people by twenty thirty one, who are a long way from it. We've got some hard work to do.
Yeah, okay, well, it's something that's definitely worth working towards. Another topic I want to talk about and I found this. I hadn't thought about this, and it's amazing. You work in the field and you think you understand everything, and then this issue was raised character references for child sex abuses.
It was mentioned to me when I was doing a podcast series called Predatory with Madeline West about child the sex offenders, and I think it was Andrew Carpenter, a solicitor from South Australia, talked about character references for petiphile and I'm thinking, yeah, well, everyone's got a right to
have a character reference. You get sense. But the nature of pedophiles child sex offenders is that they groom people and so they present it could be the scout leader, it could be the minister at the church, it could be the soccer coach. They groom people that they can be trusted and that's how they pray on the young children. So a character reference coming in when someone's been sentenced for sexually abusing the child is almost like it shouldn't be taken into account. This is my take on it.
I'll get yours shouldn't be taken into account because it was almost part of the crime in itself that they presented as a fine up scending citizen, So any character reference should be discarded. That's my interpretation of it. I know you've raised it in some of the documents. I've got what's your thoughts.
I think it's a really important topic you consider. It came on to my radar because there's some young guys here in New South Wales and winning Canberra who started a campaign about this. Harrison James has sort of been leading this and they exactly the point you're touching on is, you know, the very nature of the offense is abusive trust and as young people, the people in their lives who are supposed to look after them have actually preyed
on that relationship, that trust to then abuse them. And they comes back to that victim perspective we were talking about earlier. They then have to sit there in court and have people turn up and say, oh, this offender, this pedophile, they're a good person for all these reasons, and the victims in they go, hang on a second.
Yeah, you can see how confronting it would be.
Yeah, it's just totally offensive to them. So we're having a look at that now, and in light of that advocacy from Harrison and his colleagues, the legal community is sort of trying to bring some yuans. So they're saying, we get that argument, but at the same time, we also need to think about, well, you know, is there reability of prospects for this person and how does the
court take that into account? And we found ourselves with the Bar Association and Harrison and his colleagues really at loggerheads and we had a really interesting meeting two months ago now where we got them all in a room together. How that would an interesting It actually went really well
as a real credit. We had the police there, we had some sexual assault services, we had Harrison and his colleagues, we had the Director of Public Prosecutions, and we sat around and said, well, how do we deal with this where we make sure that we want to be able to the court to have all the information, but we deal with this impact on victims. We don't have an answer just yet. It is like so many things in
the law, the nuances of a complex. But it was so powerful to have everyone sit in a room together and hear each other's perspectives and acknowledge the different things and go away with some more ideas. So I've got my department off now having a think about what the legal answer looks like and we'll get something done on this.
We have to, Okay, I think the fact that you're having discussions and it is hard to change the laws, but laws need to be changed.
We need to evolve.
Society changes, values change, all sorts of things change. The law needs to change change as well. Sometimes you've got to drag the legal system along because it's enshrined in legal tradition.
And that's a real challenge for me as a as an attorney general. I am a reformer by natually. I think we should be getting on making things better. And this is a great example where the world has changed and we understand better the impacts and people have got a voice. But we also need to be mindful of those really important premises in our legal system that make
sure that it is fair. Justice is done. There is a presumption of innocence, people have a fair trial, all of those really fundamental principles that we want to have. How do we reform at the same time. And so that's been a real challenge for me in this role, is wanting to get on and get stuff done, but then having really smart people push back and say, well, there could be some unintended consequences here, and trying to find the nuance in the right way through.
Well, it's like I think the law about no body no parole for people convicted of the murder if the body's not recovered, as in they're obviously pleaded, not guilty being convicted, No body, no parole. I see that. I see the impact when victims of homicide families don't get their loved one back. I see the impact, and I think that it's a worthwhile legislation for some. But there's other cases where it won't work, and it makes it
very difficult. When I'm never a big believer in one law fits all, I think there needs to be mandatory sentences. Scares the hell out of me, because each case should be judged on its own merits.
So let's say I know the judges find really hard because the whole premise of a lot of our legal system is that idea of individualized justice to recognize the many, many, myriad circumstances that come before them. And then you see cases being reported in the press and they get beaten up, and the judges sat there and listen to all this and they make this really nuanced and thoughtful decision. They're
smart people. They work their way through really carefully, and then you get this very simplistic representation in the media at times. There's been some really interesting studies done around leniency right right, because often we see people saying that that sentence was too lenient. The judges are out of touch. And they've done examples where they taken ordinary citizens and sat them down and actually briefed them in detail on a case and then ask them what penalty they give.
And it turns out that the people who are just coming and they get all the circumstances and all the pleads and all these kind of things, they're usually more lenient than the judges. It's done studies of people on these things. Is one in Victorian one in Tasmania. In both cases the community were more lenient than the judges.
That's very interesting, Shane, because I think the perception would be if the community got the hold of that, we'd sort this legal system out, we'd give.
A few lynchings out there exactly.
But that's a very interesting, interesting take on it and study.
Because they're objective and know they've sat down and measured it and have had academics oversee them and really interesting pieces of work.
And look, as you said, you said, judges are smart people. Sometimes I get amazed at what they can absorb in a complex matner and then succinctly summarize what's happened. I don't say I like all the judges, but they are generally pretty smart people.
That's why they get there. I'll see about the case in New South Wales, the Bruce Lehman defamation dry Justice Michael Leevy came of his national if. People don't often know who the judges are, but he's so succinctly made his judgment. He talked about that notion of going back to the lions Den for the hat and people just went, yeah, that's something that's well.
We watched all that play out. Were you heavily involved in that tour?
We have been, and that's been a really difficult episode in the Act because the trial took place in the Act, high profile, very high profile, a lot of politics around it. We've had to subsequently have a Board of Inquiry because their allegations made by the police and the DPP about each other's conduct. We then had issues where the head of the Board of Inquiry gave the report to journalists,
they had to giving it to the government. The whole thing has really tested the system in the Act and I think exposed some cracks, but also given us some we've seen where the system works and where we might need to make some more reform.
Well, I think if mistakes have made if the thing is we mentioned that in part one, we all make mistakes. You'll make a mistake, I'll make them miss stake to day. It's just human nature. But if we learn from its mistakes and it can fix it, that's a good thing. But yeah, we won't delve into it. I imagine you would have been in the thick of it when it was going on.
Yeah, obviously not in the actual trial itself, but the many, many things that have flowed onwards. Yes, I've had to, as the Attorney General, as the first law officers, as we talked about in the first episode, take responsibility for some of these things and try and pick our way through sort of them out. You know, our Director of Public Prosecutions lost his job, and then there's all the fallout of recruiting a new one in a really political
environment and all these sort of things. It's been very challenging.
Okay, electronic monitoring, I think there is so much that can be done in that area.
I know, when we're.
All going through the COVID times, we could track everyone in the country, everywhere people went. I think it can be Electronic monitoring can be used so in so many different ways that we could make a huge difference on the way that we prevent crime and deal with crime. What's your thoughts.
Yeah, Look, the ACT is actually the only jurisdiction in Australia that does not have it. We're currently working on putting it in place. I think it's got a lot of possibilities. It's also again the nuances of it are really interesting. I think people think it could be a panacea. The work we're doing at the moment to build up a system to implement it, we're having to think very carefully about well, what type of people do you apply it to, what's a suitable crime offending type, what point
in people's journey through the justice system. People see a lot of potential around domestic and family violence particularly and the idea that you can have a bracelet on the offender and potentially the victim also carrying a chip or something. But even within that, you know, we're talking to the domestic violence services some of the victims they don't want to be carrying a chip around the whole time, and this questions rule, are you creating a false sense of security?
The idea with that is, you know, when the perpetrator gets close, alarm goes off. That's premise then on having the police resources, the police turned up in time. Otherwise you are creating this false sense of security. So there's a whole lot of nuance in it. I think it's got enormous potential, but it's probably, like all these things, not as black and white as you know you might think it is.
I spoke to Hannah Clark's parents, Lloyd and Sue Hannah from Queensland the terrible tragedy, the domestic violence where Hannah and her three children were set alight in the car, and I asked that question. And the way that they've got on with her life is just amazes me. This is how people overcome adversity. But we talked about electronic monitoring and they lived and proved that they saw what
was going on with Hannah and the partner. And they made the point that if she had if he had a bracelon when it became obvious, like yeah, domestic domestic situations, a domestic violence order taken out or protection order taken out. People often say it's only worth the paper written on, which is quite right if people aren't compliant to it. But if he had a bracelet on, and it doesn't have to be a bracelet, it could be a ring these days, who knows. There's so many different ways that
it could be could be done. And Hannah had one, and if he came within a five kilometer the radius, she'd be notified, or if he took the monitor off, she'd be notified. It would have given her peace of mind. And it's a system to I think it's something that really we should push. I think it's a way of giving comfort to the victims. And I take on board what you're saying that the victims might necessarily want to wear something that's tracking all their movements, but they should have that choice.
I think is that have that choice?
And I've also had people say, well, it's resource intensive and all that, but that's where I wind it back to. During COVID, we seem to seem to work out how to monitor people people's movements, So I think there's something something definitely there.
I also and I don't have resources intensive thing. I mean, yes, but no, if we can save somebody's life. YEA, well, resources don't really should spend that. Money don't really can't.
Come into it. And it's not at the moment that restraining all that has taken out that you get the bracelet put on your ankle. But if you're saying the propensity to ignore the conditions of it, maybe one or two strikes and you've got a bracelet.
The great risk though, as we see in these domestic violence homicides often very rapid escalation. It's working at that point intervened. And this is the bit we're trying to think through at the moment, is well, what's the right way to put in place? What's the intervention points? Yeah, they're the bits that so we don't want to create that false sense of security.
Yeah, I understand what you're saying. Coercive control is another legislation that's coming in and I think that will be a powerful legislation that once police understand how to use it properly. And we've spoken on the podcast about its coercive control as if the partner it might be physical abuse, but it might be controlling your finances, who you speak to, access to your phone, that type of thing that is
considered domestic violence. It's not the physical violence. I think there's a lot of a lot of improvements that can be made in that area as well.
Yeah, So we have a thing called the Standing Council of Attorneys General, and that's all the attorneys around the country. We issued some principles last year and what coercive control is. Because I don't think it's very well understood yet, people beginning to understand it much more clearly. We've got a lot of community education to do. We've now seen a couple of jurisdictions have made coursive control and offense a standalone offense in the act, it's not at the moment.
It is part of the definition of domestic and family violence. So you can get a restraining order based on coursive control, and then if someone breaches the restraining order that becomes the criminal offense. There is a suggestion we should make it a standalone offense. Now a couple of jurisdictions have done it. We've opted not to at this point, but we are watching very closely and seeing how that pans out.
Because one of the issues with concursive control is what's called misidentification and often not often there are circumstances where people get identified as the perpetrator rather than the victim after a wholer coercive control. They then lash out and they're seen as the perpetrator of domestic violence, and you're
getting perverse outcomes. And so there's a really I think fierce debate going on amongst domestic violence experts and advocates and service providers about how we work our way through this. And the advice we've been given at the act at the moment is we should not criminalize coercive control until we have better community education, better police training, otherwise we're going to see the wrong people being locked up. Okay, I.
Can't speak to community education, but police training is like, if you bring legislation in, we need to know how to use it if we're in the police. So i'd take your point there. Back on electronic monitoring a substitute for people going to prison, what potentially, Yes, that could be you've got to be homed by eight o'clock because you're normally committing your fences at night.
And yeah, there's a range of ways you can use them. Monitor you can use it for you can put geographic boundaries on it, you can time, curfuse on it. There's a range of things you can do. And again that's for me, the really interesting part of it presenting the judges with an alternative, because one of the things I've had conversations with judges is they say, well, I don't necessarily want to send this person away, but I haven't
got good alternatives. And that's where we've tried to really work on these alternatives in the A Sity, things like the drug court, the circle sentencing, various other models, because the judges isn't there thinking well, I've got to do something to this person. There's got to be accountability, there's got to be some punishment, there's got to be time to learn their lesson, whatever the thinking is. But that can look like many different things.
Yeah, I think we've got to start looking at that way of approaching that. There can be a lot of the positives that come from that. Then put the restrictions, so, yeah, protect the community if that's one of the risks, but also put the restrictions on the person so they don't fall back into old habits.
And particularly interesting for female offenders, we know that women of course have much more family responsibility. If they go to jail. It has a much bigger impact on the family because they so often are the primary care giver in a household. They keep the household together. If we can have a female detainee at home with the ankle bracelet rather than in custody, you know, likely the kids are going to be a lot better off, the household
is going to be running better. I don't want to get into gender stereotypes here, but this is the reality of many households in our country.
I think we don't fully appreciate. Whenever we're talking about prisons chance, the conversation tends to go towards the male inmates, and we do have a lot of female inmates as well. But I understand what you're saying taking away from the family, that the impact it's going to have. If you send a woman that's the primary care for the children at home, you've disrupted, disrupted these kids and probably possibly set them on the path that they're going to follow their mother.
Yeah, because they will potentially have to go into foster care and all the other things that you know, the disruptions that happened in kids life. Where As if that mother can serve her sentence at home, but subject to a curfew, are subject to various other restrictions. That family unit's going to be, in many cases a lot better.
Off keeping keeping people out of prison too. From a financial perspective, like, how much does it cost? Are you aware how much it costs to keep an inmate in prison for a year.
Yeah, we've just got some new data in the Act. It's one hundred and ninety eight thousand dollars a year, give or take a little bit perate per inmate per year. It's a huge amount of money. And you think about the things we could do alternatively with that money, particularly in investing in the services that will actually break that cycle of crime that we've been talking about. You know,
there's actually a really economically rational case. If you just want to be a bean counter, these measures make sense. We've just done an evaluation of the Drug and Alcohol court that I was speaking about earlier. It was done by KPMG, So again it's been done by your hard headed accountant types, and they've come back and said it's saving us more money than it's costing us to run it.
Imagine yeah, okay, what you could do with that type of type of money invested in Someone pointing them in the right direction. I think if people understood that. I don't think people fully underappreciate, appreciate the money that goes in the keeping someone in custody.
And that's that cost that I just gave you one hundred and eight. That's just being in jail. You've got all the other steps, the police costs for investigations, the costs of the court system, and all the things go around that. Let alone the cost of the impact on victims. Now that's saying you can't that's way hard hearted. It's
not about the dollar figure. But if you stack up the cost there's the ones we can measure, and then there's the immeasurable costs that are actually perhaps the most important ones.
I love food for thought. There isn't there definitely.
It's what keeps me awake at night times.
Also for a run.
Yeah, it motivate you to get back into it, though, because you can get you know, if we can make these changes.
But when we break it down, it's exciting what can be done, potentially can be done. And it's good that you come back with the complexities of it because everything's not black and white and we'll go, oh, this is simple there's always other little nuances there that make it a little bit more difficult. Lived experience form of prisoners.
You talk about people that have got out of prison or gone down the path, been employed, or doing something to help other people because they've got that lived experience and they can explain that. I am a big believer in that. I've had some very impressive people here that have had a horrific criminal record, but I know if they went and spoke to kids that were heading off in the direction, or even adult inmates, there'd be some respect.
Then they would listen to what they've got to say, what's your thoughts there?
There's a lot of potential here, and I've seen an example recently the Justice Reforming Initiative run by Mini City.
Yeah, a great great friend of the podcast.
Yes, they've got a lived experience speaker program and they've just started it. In the act. We recently had an event talking about justice reinvestment and one of the members of that program came along, actually two of them came along, and their stories were so powerful, so interesting, and they really made the case so effectively. You know, we had one fellow there, he'd been in and out of custody, for years. He'd started drinking and taking drugs at a
really young age. And he told his whole story about how he progressed through the system, and he said it wasn't until he got put into the drug and alcohol court did he start. He said, when I went into it, I was real cynical. He said, I'd seen it all. He's only thirty, but he had fifteen years in and out of the system half his life. And he said, but I wented this drugger. And he said, I was skeptical at the start. I didn't reckon it was going
to work. But it did. And he was standing there, really nicely dressed, looking very sharp, telling us about how he's back with his girlfriend now, he was studying, he had career goals that he wanted to achieve, so that lived experience style. It can be and it can also inspire others. You know. For me to sit there and tell someone, hey, you get your life back on track, I've got no credibility.
That's the thing. That's the thing. If someone's walk the path that these people are heading towards, and they're coming in and going, hey, look, I'm telling you it's not the way to go. This is what you can do. It gives them potentially to turn turn lives around. I'm a big believer in that. I'd like to see. Yeah,
I'm not just talking the ACT. I think across the board, like people that have been to prison, working back in the prisons, or working with people after they've got out of prison and help pointing them in the right direction.
And we've got some great peer workers out there in some of our services in the ACT and the drug and alcohol services. Again, people who've been down the path of having addiction. When they talk to someone else, you know, there's a real solidarity, a sense of it's truer to.
The yeah, and that that credibility.
What's your thoughts on?
Like we've talked to what goes on in prison when people are at least from prison, that's that danger period and finding employment doing something worthwhile. What's your what's your thoughts here? Because I think we can look in isolation what happens in prison, but it's what they come into when they come out of prison quite often dictates whether they're going to go back inside.
Now you spot on it's such a critical time, you know, it's this real fork in the road you come out do you go back to your mate's place, start taking drugs with them and doing all the things, or do you go down a different path. We started a program in the Act called Justice Housing, and part of the reason we did that was because one reason people weren't even getting parole was because they didn't have a stable
address to go to. For all the reasons they've lost their tendency, family didn't want to see them, their relationship was broken down because they're in custody. And so we've actually created dedicated properties where when you come out, you're entitled to go into these for sort of up to three five months, this kind of time period, not a long term homent. It's sort of a landing pad. The service providers come in so we know where people are even though they've been released and they're free to do
their thing. They've got a landing pad where they can start to rebuild their lives from Practical measures like that help people in that fork in the road. Having somewhere stable to leave is such a powerful starting point. How you found that play out, It's gone really well. Again, We've just evaluated are evaluating all these things so I can make the case to Treasury because that's how government works.
I've got to make the case to Treasury to keep investing in these things, and you know, the evaluation is come back on this again really positively, showing that it's giving people that platform to build from.
Yeah, well again, And I just keep repeating myself, but it just makes sense if a system's not working, if we acknowledge we've got this high recidivism, right, we've got to change something.
The other area that I think is really interesting to talk about his mental health. I was also the mental Health Minister for a while while I was Corrections minis. It's a really cross crossovers in the Act. We've only got eight or nine ministers and we cover a whole gamut of things, so we've always got multiple portfolios, but it gives you some opportunities to cross them over. Have
a look. The police in the Act are telling us now that thirty to forty percent of their callouts are mental health related and having it, frankly, a police officer turned up to a mental health crisis is not the best way to approach it, and the police are that'll be the first ones to say that, you know. So we've been able to do some really interesting things. One of the ones we created was a model called PACER. It's a police ambulance clinician emergency response is what it
stands for. We've created these little teams and it's a model we got from the UK. We didn't invent. Others are doing it, but you've got it. When the call comes in, you've got a car that goes out and it's got a police officer in it, paramedic and a mental health clinician because they are the three things you need in that environment. And most times, and ideally the mental health clinician will take the lead because that's their skill set.
Well, with police turning up quite often that can confront in the mental health episode or incident where police turn up in their uniforms, it escalates, it escalates.
Yeah, so in this environment, the mental health will go the lead, but you know, if it turns violent, you've got the police officer there with the skills, the training and the equipment to potentially interven in that. And so often a mental health incident involves physical harm, if someone's self harming or whatever, the paramedics there as well, and so it proves to be this really effective different model, and it means people are not any up in the
agency department. They're getting treatment at their home maybe where they're comfortable. Again, it's a different way of thinking about things. And the police love it.
I was going to I'm looking at it from a former police officer. I think that'll be fantastic.
I've gone in the car with these guys at times. You know under lights, you know that's find having. They've got the skills to drive under lights to get there urgently, and it's almost a love and you sit in the car gender the stuff and like this is such a great model. We so love working like this because it again it brings a different way of thinking to how to deal with what is a crisis situation that police
are not the best equipped for. The police was sit there and say I don't have mental health training, that's not my giit.
And look, we've had situations and jobs that I've been involved in where there's been mental health issues and if someone's been shot and killed. One of the ones I did prior to leaving the police, Courtney Topic that was having a mental health episode and the police turned up and she was shot and killed. She was carrying the knife, shot and killed. Within forty five seconds. I think it was just escalated. And on the back of that the inquest, there was a lot of recommendations came in about need
for training police in mental health issues and that. But that's what you've described is taking it to another level and having a dedicated practitioner there with the police when they're responding. And I know police don't like responding to mental health issues. I can remember it from my early days, from years gone by, and I think there was a lot less when I was in uniform than there is today. And it's not the type of job you want to want to go to. No police have been trained to
do us as to other things. They're not trained mental health clinicians. You know, we could free up a lot of police resources. There's always a debate about it, and we're having one at the moment in the act. Are there enough police If we could take this thirty or forty percent of callouts out of the police's responsibility or some police responsibility in these pacers teams bit are both, that's a whole lot of police resources to focus on the things police really should be doing.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think I've earned the right to comment on policing. But there's so many things that we should be doing and other things that we get allocated to do that really shouldn't fit in that role of a police officer.
There are a lot of.
Different things you're working on, So is do you have a vision where this is going to go? Where all the different things that you're working towards.
I think what I'd really love to see is this notion of justice reinvestment embedded into government policy, that sense of spend the money up front to try and avoid the crime, rather than just building bigger and bigger prisons. As we've talked about, prisons are expensive, they're not great places to be. The cycle of crime continues. Having a more nuanced and thoughtful conversation about how to tackle crime, that's my goal.
Delving into politics, do you think it needs when you're talking issues like this, can it be capable of having the bipartisan approach A system needs to come in?
It is possible. You look at something like the Justice reform and isitative which is a great model here in Australia, and there's some terrific people involved in that. It's people from both sides of politics, all sides of politics ex police, ex judges, people who know about it. It says to me there is scope there to build this up and to have good people come forward and say there's a better way to do it.
Yeah, so okay, we can get that possibly all working together towards it. Bringing it back to what we're talking about very early in the piece that these election you've got an election coming up, yeah, just a few weeks away. Now, law in order, it's not going to be the big talking point, al it is.
The Liberal Party are running a pretty strong law and order campaign. You know, there's about more police and we've just allocated a whole lot of new police in the last budget, because you do need to grow to the number of police. We've got fast growing town we've got new suburbs coming on stream. We do need the police resources. But my argument is we can't just be doing that. We have got to meet those needs and there's a demand there, and we've got to build a new police
station in the new area. Those kinds of things, they're just practical, ordinary government things, But that can't be the only answer.
I think one of the biggest things, and a little bit off topic for what we've been focusing on, but one of the biggest things. The problem policing have got across the country is we can't attract people to policing. I look at that and I don't know why. Maybe it's just a shift in I think COVID didn't help, like it was all the police were doing very unpopular work. But when we talk about increasing policing, I think it's
quality over quantity that is most important. If you get a good police officer, and I can only say from my career whether they be in uniform or a detective or in a specialist area, one good police officer can make a world of difference. I know when New South Wales elections when they said we're going to increase police and I had a couple of issues with police officers
that weren't performing. It took me to the PMO as in the psychological issues, and it was said to me, just in a fra away comment that what happens when whenever we have a state election and Laura in order becomes an issue, someone's promising we're going to bring in more police, so they accept police that were initially rejected and then and then it's like this, you could see
the cycle. Okay, state election, we've increased police and then you can see the ones that have created problems in the cops perhaps shouldn't have got the job in the first shouldn't have got the job in the first place, rejected first up. But let's just lower that bar a little bit further. So, Yeah, I think it's a very rewarding job policing. But yeah, the fact that we can't can't attract attract people.
Yeah, I think people probably perceive it as a pretty tough job because there's a touched on earlier. Police are going to things that frankly, the rest of the community should be pretty grateful. I don't have to deal with worst day in people's lives, horrendous violence, horrendous abuse of others. You know, it's don't need me to tell you this, I'm self, But I think people do perceive it as a potentially tough job. But I think it's also a
very rewarding job. Again, like being a corrections officer, you can make such a difference for the community.
Yeah, well that's my eyes were opened up to the quality of the people that were in corrections and the work work that they were doing. But I think in policing them, maybe even corrections everyone is so accountable in this day and age, Like as a young police officer, now you make a mistake and you become a YouTube
sensation on social media and you've done something. When I was going through you have to learn somehow you make a mistake and someone and say that's not the way we do it, this is how to do it.
It's interesting to say that we had the debate a couple of years ago about bringing body cameras for our police in the AD, and I was a real supporter of it in both directions, you know, because you also see police being accused of things they didn't do, and then there's also times where you do get people that go beyond what they should be doing and preach the protocols or whatever. And the beauty of the body camera is it just there's no argument the tapes there and you know what happened. Yeah.
Look, I would like I think I'm ahead of my time. I use my phone, but look where that got me record recording on my phone. Maybe I was just a head of my time. I agree like body cameras would be good. But what we've got, the adjustment that we've got to make for that is that we've got to be able to present all the evidence and otherwise not this stunted evidence that gets presented at court where everyone's
you know, I said this. He said that if I'm talking to a crook on the street or whatever, police think, I communicate in a level that they understand. So if I'm talking to someone that's likes to swear, I'll throw some swear words in there just to get that communication. As if I'm talking to a politician, I'll talk talk differently, you know, like that's.
The way context matters. That's the way that.
You I forgot you're a politician when I said that, But that's the way you communicate as a police officer. Now, if we're all wearing body cameras, I think we've got to Yeah, the courts have got to accept that. We've got to loosen things up a little bit. But you know, sometimes you've got to talk in a way that you can get that communication across. And I think it'll save a lot of problems. Certainly, when they bought in recording interviews.
That was as a detective there and some of the old school detectives where we used to do it on the type rise. What they're going to have a camera and we're going to record what we're saying in the inter room. Interview room sacred, we can't let people in there with a camera. But that was the best thing that saved us so much court court time, that you in an interview room, you put on the camera and start recording. So yeah, it might be a step in
the step in the right direction. Is there a resistance from police on it.
No, I think they were pretty keen. Yeah, it was just working through even the legislative issues around privacy and how could we use in some of those points you were touching on as well. But I think most people saw that it was going to work well for everybody involved. It just it clears things up and it takes away some of the activity so that when you turn up a court later, the context often is captured there.
Yeah, and like turning up I'm thinking for domestic violence incidents, like turning up and having having a camera there. But it's that that privacy issue and that but the world has changed that much. You walk out in the street, CCTV cameras catching every every movement, everything that you do. So maybe we're just going to adjust just our thinking that way.
It's the same as a politician. We all saw Barnabie Joyce on the footpath in camera a few months ago. You know, as a politician you've got everyone's got a camera out there, so we're all, you know, accountabilities up for everybody.
Yeah, see before like Barnaby Joyce sat with a would have just fallen into folklore all that time there.
But now, yeah, I do enjoy the Australie sense of human I don't know how much you followed that one, but you people then went down and chalked out body images on the ground on the footpaths justs near my place. It's right in the middle of where it happened, and so you know, I did enjoy that. People always had a bit of a laugh about it.
Well, I think we've got to keep keep our sense of humor. I take it that just in the conversations, we've had a lot of heavy subjects that we're talking about, but you've got to be able to laugh at things and see some fun fun in the world, otherwise it can just weigh you down.
There's nothing like a bit of dark humor to get through some moments as well. I'm sure it's pretty prevalent and the police. You hear it from when I talk to doctors and the like. You know, there's stuff that, yeah, you point around, it'd be seemed pretty poorly out of context. But it's a coping mechanism.
One hundred percent. That's how I survived in the cops and other people survived that long. You've got to have a laugh when we would turn up with a homicide scene, like we might be there for twenty four hours, we might have slept for forty eight hours, and you're there and you're talking. It's cold, and you'd say something and I might say something.
To you and you laugh or whatever.
You have to be wary because then if that's taken out of context, you're standing there smiling as you're standing over a dead body. And I used to I was told when I was a young homicide detective. Yeah, just keep the bear in mind. Cameras are watching you the whole time. And I would pass it, pass that advice on. But yeah, it's an interesting world, the world of crime. And I've got to say, Shane, I do like and that's what excited me about you coming on the podcast.
I like the way that you're looking at it. I don't want this tough talking chest bleeding we're going to crack down on crime because I personally don't think it always works.
Now there, You spoke very earlier about being smart on crime, not tough on crime, and that's actually what it's about. It's not about letting people off, it's not about having no accountability. It's about how do we make our community safety in the long run. And what I like about the work we're doing in the Act, and we're doing a lot of evaluations around it. The data is starting to prove it, and that's I think we're going back to the other conversation about how do we get by
paths and support on this. People believe in things they can see.
You show them the figures and how it works, show them.
What's possible, and I reckon most people get on board that. That's a bit of doing something like today where we get a chance to talk about it. People listening, they hear some different takets, perhaps what they've heard before. It's a slow journey, but I think we can build it up into a different way of doing.
It well having that discussion. That's why I like to talk about these things so I catch killers we can Yeah, we could just go down a dark hole every week, but people get sick of it and we've got to Yeah, we've got to look at ways of ways of fighting crime. And it opened my eye is up so much after I left the cops because I wanted to fight. I still wanted to fight crime. Like my career ended quickly.
But I'm finding speaking to people like yourself and just learning about different ways of approaching things that can make you huge difference. So I got to say, I like you, so good luck in your good luck in your election. I can't vote for you. It's not that I'm not in that electorate, but good luck for it. If things go well for you, Where do you see your future? You're staying in politics, You've still got the energy for it.
As I said, you've got to commit for the whole term and you sign up. So we have four year terms in the asy Tea. So I'd love to be the attorney again. I think there's a lot of we're still to be done in this space. I feel like we're still betting it down and there's really interesting research coming out all the time. There's new ways of doing it. We spoke earlier about bringing more Aboriginal controlled organizations in
so there's a lot of unfinished business there. The fire is definitely in the ability to get on with it.
Well, good on you, and it's nice to have a chat with someone that's in there that that can make that can make a difference. So thank you so much for coming on I Catch Killers.
It's been great to be here. Thanks a lot cheers.
I found the real privilege to sit down and have a discussion on I Catch Killers with a current Attorney general. It's the highest law officer in the state. And what I liked about Shame was his attitude to fixing the problem of crime, thinking outside the square a little bit, and I like his ideas and for a politician, I've got to say I quite like him.