Ms ROSOL (Bass) – The Greens welcome this opportunity to focus on young people and speak about the issues that matter to them, and particularly the vulnerable young people in Tasmania. I would like to begin by focusing on the contradiction in the government’s messaging around young people. On one hand they speak of their response to the commission of inquiry report, saying that they are committed to implementing the recommendations, providing trauma-informed services, being therapeutic and having a therapeutic justice system. At the same time the Minister for Police, Fire and Emergency Management is obsessed with labelling and stigmatising young people, and stoking negative attitudes towards young people, characterising them as criminals to the point of calling them ‘career criminals’.
Young people who engage in criminal behaviour do not form in a vacuum. They do not act in a vacuum. There are many factors that contribute to the reasons they behave in the ways they do. Those factors include poverty, intergenerational trauma, exposure to family violence, being part of the out-of-home care system and being in out-of-home care, drug and alcohol use, homelessness, mental health concerns and cognitive disability.
There are a whole range of reasons why young people engage in criminal behaviours, and to label young people in the way members of the Liberal government have is heartless and uninformed. The tough‑on-crime response pushes young people further towards the criminal justice system – a system which we know is unsafe for young people. Evidence shows it pushes them further in the direction of crime.
For this reason, we need to be doing all we can to keep young people away from the youth justice system. We need to take urgent action across a range of measures that address those factors that lead to young people engaging in crime. In relation to young people who are being detained at Ashley Youth Detention Centre, we need urgent action to ensure that diversion processes are accessible for young people and available. We need to be ensuring that there are alternatives to detention, so that detention is a last resort, rather than the situation we have at the moment where it seems to be the only resort.
We need to be ensuring that there are bail options available for young people that are not available for them now, often due to the living situation that they are in. We need action to address youth homelessness and to ensure that young people have access to housing so that they do not need to engage in criminal behaviour to have their needs met.
I note some of the report comments and quotes that the Commissioner for Children and Young People provided through the Voices Project recently, where young people said that at times, they are choosing criminal behaviours because they do not have a home and they do not have food. In terms of out-of-home care right now, we do not know how long it takes from an initial notification of child abuse and neglect for an investigation to start and be completed, because the government is not reporting those figures. We know that they are not reporting them federally as all the other states are. We do know that the Child Safety Service is struggling with insufficient staff. Children are in care; and their case management is being managed by teams rather than individual case managers, which affects their access to services they need and them having a voice. Children in unsafe situations are at times not having their situation investigated in a timely manner.
Young people who transition out of out‑of‑home care are at the highest risk of homelessness, and we need to do more to ensure that we are providing support and accommodation for what is an incredibly difficult transition for children and young people out of care.
In the analysis by Saul Eslake that the Greens spoke about in Question Time today, we read that the costs of implementing the recommendations of the commission of inquiry and of meeting claims against the state by abuse survivors are likely to be significantly in excess of the funding currently allocated.
The government has failed to provide adequate funding for our young people, from child safety services and alternatives to Ashley Youth Detention Centre, and now we see also for the implementation of the commission of inquiry recommendations. The government must do better for our young people. It must fund and support them in the way that they need so they can flourish.
The SPEAKER – The member’s time has expired. I call the member for Bass.
