Warren Mundine has criticised a federal government plan to hold another inquiry into Indigenous incarceration rates, describing it as a “joke” and saying the Turnbull government’s policy record on Indigenous affairs is “crap”.
“I don’t know who the dickhead is who actually thought up this incredibly brilliant idea,” the head of the prime minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council told Sky News. “It’s just a total waste of taxation money.”
The attorney general, George Brandis, and the Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, announced on Thursday that they would ask the Australian Law Reform Commission to look at the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in the justice system and consider what reforms could be made to reverse that trend.
The idea was criticised by Indigenous leaders, including the Labor senator Pat Dodson and the Change The Record co-chair Shane Duffy, who said the focus on criminal law reform, which was the purview of state and territory governments, would produce a set of recommendations that the federal government was powerless to implement.
But they did offer a cautious welcome, saying that if the inquiry could focus on social determinants of incarceration, such as poverty, homelessness and poor mental health, the federal government could leverage the funding it provided in those areas to force the states and territories to act.
Mundine was less optimistic.
“It’s going to have no end. I actually could tell them what they need to do,” he said.
“I just find this a joke, and I’m getting sick and tired of the crap that is coming out of this government in regard to Indigenous affairs.”
Failure to implement recommendations on reports in this area dates back to the royal commission on Aboriginal deaths in custody, which made 339 recommendations in its final report in 1991.
Despite celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, very few of those recommendations have been implemented.
There have been six federal government inquiries in the past seven years, producing 203 recommendations.
One of the royal commission’s recommendations was to introduce a national mandatory custody notification system, operated independently by the Aboriginal Legal Service.
The only state to adopt that recommendation was New South Wales, which had no Indigenous deaths in police custody from the implementation of the scheme in 2000 until July this year, when a loophole around protective custody meant police did not use the scheme to notify the ALS that they had taken Wiradjuri woman Rebecca Maher into custody. Maher died less than six hours later and her death will be subject to a coronial inquiry.
On Friday, Dodson, who was one of the commissioners responsible for the 339 recommendations, blasted Scullion for only recently offering seed funding to every state and territory to set up their own custody notification system and for failing to ensure they took up the option.
Western Australia, where Yamatji woman Ms Dhu died in police custody in 2014 in the same circumstances a custody notification system was designed to prevent, has already publicly refused, saying its own non-mandatory system is sufficient.
Dodson told ABC’s 7.30 program that the memory of the royal commission had “faded in the cultures of law enforcement agencies, custodial agencies and certainly in the public sector bureaucracies”, and that Labor governments had been equally responsible for the lack of action.
Scullion hit back at Mundine, telling ABC radio in Alice Springs that the Bundjalung man was “having a bad hair day”, adding: “what he said is complete and utter garbage”.
“Now, Warren and me are good mates and we like having robust conversations, and I can see we’re going to have one,” he said.
The rate of Indigenous incarceration nearly doubled in the 25 years since the royal commission – from 14% in 1991 to 27% in 2015 – while the proportion of the Australian population who identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander has remained a steady 3%.
Indigenous adults are 14 times more likely to be in jail than non-Indigenous adults, and Indigenous children – some as young as 10 – are 27 times more likely to be in juvenile detention than non-Indigenous children.
