Subjects: Visit to Kimberley; Justice reinvestment; Youth services; Age of criminal responsibility; Closing The Gap; Live cattle export class action; Live sheep trade.
VANESSA MILLS: Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has left the chilly Winter halls of political power to see how youth and community services programs in Kununurra, Derby and Broome are functioning. Good morning Attorney-General.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL MARK DREYFUS: Good morning, Vanessa. It’s very nice to be with you.
MILLS: What impressions have you had of the services that you’ve visited in Kununurra and Derby?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Well, as always when I come to the Kimberley, I see how hard people are working. I’ve been to the Kimberley many times but it’s a reminder to me of the distances, of the difficulties of getting resources up here. Difficulties in hiring, difficulties in retention of staff. But equally, I’m always struck by the tremendous commitment and resolve of the people that work in youth and community services. I’ve been up here with the State Attorney General and with Senator for WA Sue Lines, the President of the Senate and traveling with us, the wonderful local member, Divina D’Anna. So, we were quite a party, but that helped me, I think, being here with the local Member. it helped me get introduced to all of these terrific local services.
MILLS: And what did you see that is working and filling a gap?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Well, one of the things that I was particularly interested to meet with was the people from Emama Nguda in Derby. I’ve arranged funding for, since we came to office in 2022, some 20 Justice Reinvestment projects right across Australia and the Justice Reinvestment project in this part of Australia is in Derby is provided by Emama Nguda. And what they are doing is building on youth services that they’ve already got. They know, in a sense, what works. It’s things that are designed to keep kids at school, make sure that they’re getting proper meals, working to support families, so as to keep kids away from crime. Now, that’s the purpose of Justice Reinvestment. It seems to me that they’ve got a good model, and we’re going to learn lessons from it in coming years.
MILLS: Attorney-General you visited the new Night Space in Broome last night. What did you make of this trial scheme?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: It’s been going since April. I went with Senator Lines, the President of the Australian Senate and Divina D’Anna in the bus, following the other vehicle that’s going around the streets of Broome pretty late at night. The service starts at 10:30pm and we’re out there till about midnight, and it goes on after. I went home to get some sleep. I was very impressed to see the degree of connection that the team have got with kids who are on the street in Broome. It’s a program that, again, is designed to make sure they’re getting meals, make sure that they’re going home when they should be, making sure that their parents know where they are and their carers know where they are. I was really impressed by the level of connection that the people on the team have already been able to form, even though the program has been going only since April. The idea of Night Patrol is not a new one. We’ve seen it operating for decades. I’ve been on night patrol in Tennant Creek, I’ve been on night patrol in Darwin, and it’s good to see this night patrol making Broome streets safer. Giving the kids better lives.
MILLS: What did you see last night? How busy was it?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: I was told by the team that it was a medium busy night. And there was some kids out, at what looked to me pretty late at night, but happy to be picked up, happy to be provided with a meal and happy in some cases to be driven home to where they should be.
MILLS: The service says that in the first eight weeks of its operation it had about 150 young people that it was interacting with and taking into the Space, taking home. What does that say to you about the level of dysfunction in families?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: It says to me that there are kids wandering around pretty late at night. That’s a problem. It says to me that there are kids that perhaps are not feeling safe in the places that they live. And it says to me that the people on this wonderful program, here in Broome, have devised something that looks like it might be able to work. It’s going to make the whole community safer. And that’s a very good thing.
MILLS: Will you go back to Canberra and talk with your ministerial colleagues who often hold portfolios that influence whether or not there is social dysfunction or rehabilitation or services that make people’s lives better, and say to them, look, I need to do more.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: I’ll give credit where it is due. This is a group called Ngurra Buru here in Broome. It’s a program that’s funded by the state government but equally Night Patrol is funded by the federal agency NIAA right across Australia. I’m interested in things which work. I’m interested in things which improve community safety. I’m interested in what are the best ways to prevent and reduce crime and to keep kids, to keep Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids away from crime in the first place. That’s what we should be trying to do.
MILLS: In the July meeting of the Attorneys-General you heard that Aboriginal youth incarceration rates were not on track under the Closing The Gap targets. Why are those rates not improving?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: I think that it’s a complex multifaceted problem. We’ve got to keep looking for different ways of preventing and reducing crime. We’ve got to look at different ways of improving community safety. One thing that is absolutely clear, Vanessa is that local led approaches work best. That’s the theme of these 20 Justice Reinvestment projects. We’ve got another 10 coming in the next round. That’s the theme of these justice reinvestment projects. Right across Australia they are local led. Communities devise their own local solutions that divert at risk adults, divert at risk children away from crime into a safer ways of living.
MILLS: Ideally, though, we shouldn’t need them. It’d be great if we didn’t have to fund them.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Well, it’d be great if we didn’t have any crime in Australia, but that has not been the case since the First Fleet arrived and I don’t think it’s going to be the case tomorrow. We need we need to look at ways to divert. We need to be aware that simply punitive approaches don’t seem to be working. So let’s look for innovative ways to approach the justice system. That’s why it’s called Justice Reinvestment. We know that we spend billions of dollars on the criminal justice system and we’ve got to think harder. Are we spending the money in the right way?
MILLS: Also at the Attorneys-General meeting, the age of criminal responsibility was on the agenda. Again, what age should be set nationally?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: This is a topic for discussion on the agenda of the Standing Council of Attorneys-General. The Commonwealth is working with the states and territories on this and we’re going to continue to work with it. One of the things about raising the age is that in order to be able to raise the age you need to have in place other programs so that police have got an alternative to simply sweeping up children and then they are in the criminal justice system and in detention. Our aim should be to keep children, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, out of the criminal justice system in the first place.
MILLS: Do you think it should be a national age rather than each state setting the age of criminal responsibility?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: We’re in a Federation Vanessa and I wish I could wave a magic wand sometimes and just set the law for the whole of Australia but that is not available to me. I am the Commonwealth Attorney-General. I work in a Federation. Some things are the 100% responsibility of the Commonwealth Government, others are not and criminal justice is not. Criminal justice is a shared responsibility between the states and territories and the Commonwealth. There are bits of the criminal legal system which aren’t Commonwealth and most of it, and I’m talking 99% of criminal law matters are state or territory and will involve state police. One of the reasons why we have a Standing Council of Attorneys-General, which meets quarterly, more often than almost any other ministerial council and I reinstated on coming to government in 2022, it had been abolished by the former government, is we do need to work together. We do need to cooperate and we do need to share ideas. The Police Ministers council as well which I Chair. Both of these councils are terrific occasions to share ideas about what’s working.
MILLS: It’s a quarter to eight on ABC Radio across the Kimberley Vanessa Mills with you this morning and in the studio is the Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus. On other matters Attorney-General is Labor’s offer of $215 million to settle the live export cattle class action adequate?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: This is my responsibility. It’s not often that I get asked about current litigation. It’s a very, very long running, unresolved class action brought by exporters of live cattle to Indonesia. In 2011 the Commonwealth Government stopped the trade fairly suddenly. The Commonwealth Government was sued by a number of the exporters who grouped together in a class action and sometime back, at least three years ago, Justice Rares in the Federal Court found that the Commonwealth was liable. I’ve made an offer to settle that litigation to the cattle exporters for $215 million which is a very generous offer and as yet it’s been rejected. So, we’ve seen attempts made by some of those associated with the class action to litigate the matter in the media. That’s not the appropriate place for the Commonwealth to settle litigation.
MILLS: That snap ban had a big impact, not just on station owners and cattle producers in this region, but right throughout the rural communities. It could be the fencing contractors or the trucking contractors or the people who supply rural properties with the things that they need. Suddenly, they had no ongoing work. The matter hasn’t been settled and it’s been going on for a decade. Do you think that there is a chance that it will be settled out of court or will it go to court again for the hearings in April next year?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: I used to be a litigator before I became the Commonwealth Attorney-General. It’s always appropriate that we try to settle litigation without lengthy and expensive trials. I’m very hopeful that what is a more than reasonable offer that the Commonwealth has made here is accepted. I’d make the point, and there’s evidence clear evidence about this, that the produces found alternative markets for their cattle. The amount that the Commonwealth has offered to settle this litigation, it’s an eye watering amount of money, $215 million is well over the amount of profit that those producers would have made. That’s the basis for the calculation in the period in which their trade to Indonesia was interrupted. So, there you go. Vanessa, I’m litigating the matter now in public, but the Commonwealth stands by what, as I’ve said publicly, is a generous offer.
MILLS: With that long running action and the legacy been left from that snap ban for live cattle export, the more recent ban by Labor on live sheep trade overseas, does Labor in fact risk alienating a large sector of Australia’s agricultural population?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: I don’t think so. This is something that is Labor honouring an election commitment made at two elections. I’m not going to speak more about it because it’s a matter for the Minister for Agriculture, I should say the new Minister for Agriculture, Julie Collins. But it’s something about which the previous Minister for Agriculture, Murray Watt spoke eloquently, and I’m not going to go past the comments that he’s made. I’ll leave it to the new Minister for Agriculture, Julie Collins.
MILLS: So, Mark Dreyfus, when you return to Canberra, what will be the standout take home thing from this Kimberley visit for you? What do you want to do now?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Always when I’ve been to the Kimberley I’ve been struck by the distances and the just how difficult it is for government services, State and Commonwealth, to be provided across the Kimberley. I’d like to think that one of the things I can do as someone who’s been a reasonably frequent visitor to the Kimberley, is make sure all of my colleagues understand that there’s thousands of kilometres across the Kimberley. We’ve got very remote communities. We want everybody living in every part of the Kimberley to have access to government services. All of my colleagues in the different portfolios need to understand there’s a degree of difficulty about providing those services.
MILLS: It’s been great to talk with you. Thank you for sparing your time this morning.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Thanks Vanessa.
MILLS: The Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus on ABC Kimberley. He’s been in the region this week with the delegation visiting Kununurra, Derby and Broome.
