Victoria’s minister for youth affairs, Jenny Mikakos, has responded to growing pressure to stand down over the government’s handling of continued youth rioting in the state’s detention centres, saying she is committed to staying and fixing the system.
Over the weekend teenage detainees at the Parkville youth detention centre ripped out pool fencing to use as weapons, forcing the evacuation of staff. Police were called in and seven prisoners were moved to the Barwon adult prison and the Malmsbury centre.
It follows rioting by young inmates at the Parkville and Malmsbury youth detention facilities over several months. The damage at Parkville forced the government in November to move a number of youths to the Barwon adult prison.
Mikakos has faced criticism from lawyers for the children as well as human rights advocates for detaining the children in an adult facility.
In December, the court of appeal upheld a ruling by the supreme court that detaining the children in Barwon was unlawful, because the government had failed to take certain factors into consideration before declaring an area of the prison a youth justice facility.
Although the court ordered the children be removed from Barwon, Mikakos said 24 hours later the government had again regazetted the Grevillea unit of Barwon as a youth justice facility, having addressed the outstanding issues. She has maintained the decision was in the best interests of the children.
Lawyers for the children are yet to decide if they will appeal again, but the latest riots have renewed pressure on the minister to stand down.
Mikakos told radio 3AW in Melbourne on Monday that youth detention in the state had not been looked at for “decades” and she was in the process of strengthening the system. The Parkville centre was not necessarily appropriate for the most dangerous and recidivist youth offenders, she said.
“We are reviewing the whole youth justice system,” she said. “I’m giving it a very big shakeup.”
The opposition spokeswoman for children and families, Georgie Crozier, accused Mikakos and the premier, Daniel Andrews, of failing to get tough on the youth offenders.
That the children were allowed in a pool in the minutes before the rioting began was evidence of this, Crozier said. Temperatures reached 37C in Melbourne over the weekend, and the children allegedly refused to get out of the pool when ordered to by prison staff.
“Daniel Andrews and Jenny Mikakos keep saying that repeated rioting on their watch is unacceptable but the reality is that they not only accept it, but they reward it,” Crozier said.
“Instead of getting tough on these repeat offenders that Jenny Mikakos calls ‘the worst of the worst’, the Andrews government is rewarding them with pizza, video games and pool parties.
“Daniel Andrews needs to put community safety ahead of his factional mate and sack Jenny Mikakos before she does any more damage.”
Mikakos told Guardian Australia the opposition was “more interested in lies and smears than the facts”.
“The government is not just repairing Parkville but working around the clock to fortify it to ensure these types of incidents don’t happen,” she said.
“We are housing young offenders in the Grevillea unit at Barwon Prison, while this work takes place. The offenders in Parkville are there because the courts have determined they shouldn’t be in the community.”
Last week, Mikakos drew criticism from lawyers representing the children for saying there were “obvious risks” that children in detention would assault and rape each other if they were returned to shared cells in youth detention facilities.
