Indigenous leaders have cautiously welcomed plans for a fresh inquiry into the high rates of Indigenous incarceration, providing it delivers tangible changes in government policy.
George Brandis, the attorney general, announced on Thursday that he would ask the Australian Law Reform Commission to investigate the issue, saying the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in the justice system was a “national tragedy” and a poor reflection on Australian society.
In a speech to the Australian Bar Association in Melbourne, Brandis said the doubling of incarceration rates since the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody showed attempts by successive governments to address the issue had failed.
“Those statistics of course paint a stark picture – a picture of failed initiatives and flawed or incomplete reform efforts which, despite the best intentions, often deliver little by way of tangible progress and indeed, as those statistics reveal, we have gone backwards,” Brandis said.
The inquiry would focus on legal reform to address the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in the justice system, with the terms of reference to be set in consultation with Indigenous organisations.
Western Australian Labor senator Pat Dodson, a Yawuru man who was on the 1988-91 royal commission, said any fresh inquiry would have to be accompanied by real action to combat the cynicism felt by many in the Indigenous community who had seen inquiry after inquiry pass without change.
“In this case at least they’ve done something,” he said. “The effectiveness of it has yet to be seen, of course.”
The inquiry was announced a week after Dodson criticised the Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, for “amnesia” over past inquiries into Indigenous incarceration.
The royal commission in particular produced 339 recommendations, very few of which have been enacted.
“[Scullion] may have peered through the window into the morass in front of him and got a bit of a fright,” Dodson told Guardian Australia on Thursday. “I am not confident that there is a real sense of zeal about this.”
Rates of Indigenous imprisonment have doubled in the 25 years since the royal commission, from 14% of the prison population in 1991 to 27% in 2015.
Indigenous adults are 15 times more likely to be jailed than non-Indigenous adults, Indigenous women are 30 times more likely, and Indigenous children are 26 times more likely.
Dodson said any new inquiry should include an examination of the extent to which current social policy addresses the underlying causes of disadvantage which contribute to incarceration rates.
Reforms like scrapping mandatory sentencing laws in WA or paperless arrest laws in the Northern Territory would reduce incarceration, he said, but are outside of federal government control.
“The social policy settings are as crucial as any reform to the legal situation, and that’s something the federal government does control,” he said.
WA senator Rachel Siewert said she had “no confidence” another inquiry would reduce Indigenous incarceration rates, which are growing by 7% a year.
“There’s been report after report but little action,” she said. “It’s astounding that they are so out of touch that they think this is a good idea.”
Siewert sat on the most recent parliamentary inquiry into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experiences of law enforcement and justice, which handed down its final, largely ignored report this month.
It produced 11 recommendations, including ensuring the federal government adequately funded Indigenous legal services, operating justice reinvestment trial sites in every state and territory, and asking the Council of Australian Governments (Coag) to review the effect of mandatory sentencing laws on Indigenous Australians.
It was the sixth federal government report on Indigenous incarceration in the past seven years.
There was the Senate access to justice inquiry in 2009 (31 recommendations), the lower house inquiry into Indigenous youth experiences with the criminal justice system in 2011 (40 recommendations), a lower house inquiry in 2012 into the prevention and diagnosis of foetal alcohol spectrum disorders (19 recommendations), the Senate inquiry into justice reinvestment in 2013 (nine recommendations), and the productivity commission report on access to justice in 2014 (83 recommendations).
Shane Duffy, co-chair of Change the Record, echoed Dodson’s call for a focus on social policies over law reform.
He said the federal government would achieve more by leveraging funding it provides under national partnership agreements for the Close the Gap program to force states and territories to address issues such as inequality, poor education, poor health and unemployment.
“It’s all very well to talk about imprisonment to employment,” Duffy said. “But if I’m in jail and I’m released, in many situations I’m sick, I’m not well educated and I have got nowhere to live. So then I’m homeless and unemployed.”
Duffy, a Kalkadoon man, said that in those circumstances most people would return to jail.
He had no option but to remain hopeful that Indigenous incarceration rates could be reduced.
“There has got to come a time when Australian politicians, regardless of what political party you are from, realise that this isn’t working,” he said.
Roxanne More, a Noongar woman and Indigenous rights spokeswoman for Amnesty Australia, said the inquiry could be useful if it focused on the racism and discrimination Indigenous Australians faced in the justice system.
“We have had many reports and inquiries that have made recommendations about Indigenous incarceration ... but we also have to talk about systemic factors that contribute to that,” Moore said.
Indigenous incarceration was a complex problem, but she said: “It’s one that we have known the answers to for a long time, and now we have got a momentum and, it seems, a will to change it at a national level.”
