Ms ROSOL – Minister, could you provide a breakdown of the ages of children held in Ashley Youth Detention Centre during 2023‑24, please?
Mr JAENSCH – I don’t think I have an age profile in my folder. I’m happy to see if the department can look that up while we’re at the table. If you have another question you’d like to proceed with, we could return to that one when they have an answer ready for you.
Ms ROSOL – Yes, can do. In the budget papers, it shows the average number of children in Ashley Youth Detention Centre each day has grown by 79 per cent in two years. In that time, the centre’s gone from an on average detaining nine children per day to over 16. That’s despite stark warnings from the commission of inquiry of live and current risks of abuse and human rights violations and the former commissioner for Children and Young People’s warnings that more children there leads to greater risk. Why have you allowed for the number of children at Ashley to increase so much? Do you accept that this has increased risks to children at the centre?
Mr JAENSCH – The number of young people in the Ashley Youth Detention Centre fluctuates daily. Typically, within the range of 10 to 16 or so has been normal over the last couple of months. I understand there’s 15 young people in the Ashley Youth Detention Centre today.
The number of young people that we have in there is a reflection of the decisions of courts and magistrates regarding where young people need to be held in relation to their offending behaviour, and also the extent to which they presented with suitable supports to enable them to be bailed outside of the detention facility.
The number does fluctuate. It has stabilised over the last couple of months, which has been very welcome. There is ongoing work to intercept those young people earlier in their in their offending behaviour, but also to provide more options when young people have offended and are presenting for the first time to someone who makes a decision about what happens to them next.
Our clear aim and significant investment in in this Budget of around $16 million is directed to various forms of intervention and diversion for those young people. This includes addressing their behaviours in the community before they offend, and developing partnerships and procedures with organisations that can support our police and community youth justice services to provide bail plans and options, sometimes including accommodation for those young people. That way we can present courts and JPs with sound bail plans that meet the needs of those young people and they are not defaulting to detention when there are other options. We need to develop more of those options and be able to deploy them very quickly in response to a young person’s offending.
Ms ROSOL – I understand that and I understand that it fluctuates, but the average has gone up over the two years. Then, looking in the Budget, you have an aspirational target that there will still be, on average, 15 children in Ashley until at least the middle of next year, which is essentially the same as current levels. Despite all the action that you talk about and that it’s a court decision, there is no change in the average number over that time. I’m interested in the word that you’ve chosen, you’ve said ‘aspiration’ rather than ‘projection’. Do you have a projection that it will be even greater than that? Is that why you’re aspiring to only have 15?
Mr JAENSCH – I’ll ask someone else who knows how the budget papers are put together. Maybe Mr Salter can talk to us about the choice of words and conventions regarding projections and aspirations, targets, et cetera. Clearly, our aspiration is to have no young people in detention. Back from that, only those young people who were sentenced to detention should be in detention. Beyond that, only those who a court determines are a great risk to themselves or a community and cannot be held in some other more suitable form of accommodation should be in in detention. There is a process for the purposes of a budget that there is a conservative estimate of what we need to be able to budget for or around to ensure we have provision in the event that the current trend continues.
Our policy and operational response that we’re talking about here today, largely with the commission of inquiry, our Youth Justice Taskforce, and the work of many, many people who are on this right now is to drive that number right down to its lowest possible level.
Ms ROSOL – I’m asking because previous years have used the word ‘projection’ and this Budget has changed it to the word ‘aspiration’. I’m trying to understand that.
Mr JAENSCH – I’ll ask Mr Salter if he can comment on that or Ms Burgess, because it’s a convention in the construction of the papers.
Ms BURGESS – We’ve changed the way that we’ve approached our targets for the budget papers across the entirety of the department. When we became a new department back in October 2022, there was a conscious decision to make those targets more aspirational and not just solely based on statistical calculations. As you see there, for that one where the average daily young people in youth justice detention, by way of example, there, if you did a trajectory from 13.6 to 16.3, you would have that going up and you’d have confidence intervals around that. What we’ve done is we’ve drawn the line of best fit based on that statistical calculation and said, ‘No, that’s not good enough. We want to be reducing the number of children in detention’. Therefore, while the statistical calculation might be higher, we’ve said we need to make sure that we are working to a reduced target of number of children in detention.
Ms ROSOL – Wouldn’t you want to reduce it to what it was a couple of years ago and be even more aspirational than just what it is now?
Ms BURGESS – We would like to be aspirational. As the minister indicated, there are a number of factors that are outside the control of our department. A number of those decisions are made by the courts and not by our department. We receive them, look after them, case manage them, and try to get them out as quickly as possible.
Mr JAENSCH – We’re doing everything we can to put different options in front of courts, so even the most conservative after‑hours JP can be presented with some solutions for young people that don’t involve them defaulting to remand.
Ms ROSOL – I was wondering if we can go back to the projections and aspirations and the calculations that were done around that? What was the statistical model that was used? What were the calculations that were used to produce those figures and projections?
Mr JAENSCH – I’d ask Ms Burgess if she could speak to that.
Ms BURGESS – I’d have to get my data and systems and insights team here to be able to take you through the technical side of those calculations. Are you specifically asking for those measures in the Budget?
Ms ROSOL – Just how you came up with those figures and how you calculated those figures? What were the inputs you were putting into it to determine that you had a projection that was heading up, but you had an aspiration that you thought was achievable? What were the inputs that you put in to produce that?
Ms BURGESS – I can certainly get my data team to get an answer to that.
Ms ROSOL – The question is about the projection rather than the aspiration. What was the projection based on the current trajectory? Do you have that figure? You went for 15 for the aspiration. What was the projection going to be?
Ms BURGESS – Are you comfortable if I take that, Mathew?
Mr JAENSCH – I’m comfortable for you to provide Ms Rosol with any information she wants on that. I just need to confirm that I’m not aiming for 15. There’s a column in the budget papers and a formula for filling it, which I do sometimes find that they’re a bit meaningless in some settings. It’s a little bit different when you’re talking about performance data on other areas where we’re trying to hit a particular target for a reason.
With this one, our aim would be to reduce that number down dramatically, ideally to 0. What we do have to do is also make provision for things that are outside of our control, which might mean that our budget papers need to reflect a reasonable provision so that, ultimately, we have the capacity in our system to look after our young people in our care, no matter what circumstances.
Ms ROSOL – We can only go with what’s written down on the paper, and it says 15.
Mr JAENSCH – Yes, but it’s not guiding our work to achieve 15. We don’t get any reward for hitting that target.
Ms ROSOL – I have another question. You referred a couple of times to things beyond your control. At the election, your government announced a so‑called strike force to crack down on youth crime. By the government’s own measure, the goal of that policy is to arrest and charge more young people. Doesn’t that mean that the government policy is to send more children to detention – if you’ve got a strike force policy that will result in more of them being arrested? It’s in direct conflict with the goals of the Youth Justice Blueprint and with what you’re saying in terms of aspirations. I can’t figure out how those two things fit together. I’m wondering if you can shed some light on that?
Mr JAENSCH – One’s about keeping the community safe from violent crime and damage to property. The other question is about what do we do with those young people to address their offending behaviour and help them to not become part of our youth justice and adult correction system. They can sit alongside each other quite well. One is about making sure the community is safe. That’s the role of police. The question then is what happens to these young people? What we’re doing at the moment is clearly not working, for the young people or for the communities where their offending happens.
That’s why all of this work is so important – to address them earlier, address the causes of their offending, and prevent their offending and antisocial behaviour in the first place. For those who do end up committing crimes in the community, we don’t not see that. We have to find better solutions for it. At the moment they’re doing it again and again and again. That’s no good for their community. It’s certainly not good for young people. I see my job as intercepting them earlier and working out, with all of the skills we have and all of the best advice we can get, what we can do in the life of those young people that turns them around. If we can do that well, they’ll be better off and their communities will be safer places.
Ms ROSOL – Minister, just checking in on that projection information around the projection aspiration, is that available yet or is it something that we could put on as a question on notice if it’s taking a while to find it?
Mr JAENSCH – I don’t know who was looking at that. Ms Burgess, do you have an update for us?
Ms BURGESS – The team are still working on that.
Mr JAENSCH – Okay, if we haven’t got that by the end of our session today, we’ll take it on notice. If we can provide it at the table, we will.
Ms ROSOL – Great, thank you. Just going back to what you were saying about the average daily number of children in Ashley: on DECYP’s reporting dashboard, it has the quarterly figures for what’s happening in youth justice. In December 2023 quarter, the average daily number of children in Ashley is 13.3, in March quarter it was 16.8, and in the June 2024 quarter it was 21.5. So, it’s been going up, but you said it’s stabilised and starting to reduce which is great. Do you have figures on that? I know that there’s still a few days left in this quarter, but do you have any figures on how that’s been tracking through this quarter given the trajectory was up, but you’re saying that it has stabilised now?
Mr JAENSCH – At the beginning of the quarter, there was a period where we had some very high numbers for a period of weeks and the quarter that those numbers fell in will be an anomaly in otherwise a more consistent trend.
Ms ROSOL – It’s likely to still be high, but that’s reflected at the beginning of the quarter, not the later part of the quarter?
Mr JAENSCH – I’ll just look to Mr Woodfall to help with that.
Mr WOODFALL – I’m just looking for it, but I do know it. Since that last quarter, certainly recent numbers have been averaging around 13, 15 in the last month or so.
Ms ROSOL – Just a question, we’ve obviously only got one detention centre in the state. What’s the contingency plan for young people who are in the detention centre if Ashley was to face an unexpected event and it was unable to be used? What’s the backup plan in that situation?
Mr JAENSCH – Do you have an example of what you mean by not able to be used?
Ms ROSOL – An extreme weather event or fire or something like that meant that it wasn’t safe to have young people there anymore? Is there a backup plan for that situation?
Mr JAENSCH – I’d ask the managers at the other end of the table to give thought to the sort of risk strategies that you might have, but one of the things that I will comment on is that one of the advantages of the Ashely facility is that it was originally designed for a far larger number of occupants than we’re currently using it for which means that the layout of the facility gives management some options in how we utilise the capacity to accommodate different groups to be able to keep, say females and males separate and to be able to separate older and younger people or those with challenging behaviours, and sometimes there are grievances between groups of young people and they need to be able to be kept separate.
There’s quite a bit of flexibility within the site and within the range of buildings there. If, for example, one of those buildings was disabled by the roof blown off or some other failure, there is some capacity within the existing Ashley structure to redeploy it and use it in different ways. I think that happens from time to time and that’s an inbuilt flexibility.
In terms of whether there is a contingency plan in case there was an inability to use the whole of the Ashley facility, I’d ask if Mr Woodfall or Ms Burgess might want to comment on that.
Mr WOODFALL – Yes, I am getting that information but what I do know practically, we have a weekly AYDC escalation meeting and that was instigated once we started working with DPAC on reform. We meet and we discuss and we’ve got a level of escalation which could be a variety of factors from staffing to numbers of young people to complexity of young people. There’s a whole lot of variables where we feel like what is our current capacity and how are we travelling?
At the extreme case like an extreme weather event, we have a temporary agreement with the Launceston Remand Centre. That is in exceptional circumstances, but we’re exploring those legislative changes around that currently. There is a temporary agreement in place.
Ms ROSOL – How temporary?
Mr WOODFALL – In that we would be able to house people there with our staff and support young people, but I think under the proviso that this isn’t a long-term solution, that you’re not closing actually and putting young people in the watch house.
