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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
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Bills

Electoral (Prisoner Voting) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Debate resumed.

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL (Schubert—Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Local Government, Minister for Planning) (12:39): I also rise to make a contribution to this bill to say wholeheartedly that I support the Electoral (Prisoner Voting) Amendment Bill 2018. I will outline very quickly, as others have done, that essentially where somebody commits an offence that attracts a prison term of three years or longer, their voting rights should be forfeited. This change brings us in line with every other jurisdiction with the exception of the ACT.

This sits as part of a broader criminal justice framework that we need to consider when we look at amendments and proposals such as this. What we are trying to do is find ways to ensure that people who do the wrong thing in our community, who commit crime—in this case commit serious crime, and if we are talking about a sentence of gaol of longer than three years, we are talking about more serious criminal offences—are helped to stop offending. Essentially, we do that with a mixture of two different sometimes competing but in the end complementary ways.

The first of those is to punish people. The act of sentencing somebody to gaol is a very strong deterrent and has been demonstrated to be a very strong deterrent to people committing crimes. It is important that we continue to uphold and to look at our sentencing regime to ensure that sentences are in line with community expectations but also that they are there to do the job of trying to ensure that people, to the greatest extent possible, do not reoffend. The second part of trying to reduce recidivism is to try to rehabilitate prisoners.

In this way, I think that what we are trying to achieve out of this amendment bill is a little bit of both. We are trying to essentially provide that impetus to those who are in gaol who are going to be subject to this—that if you want to participate in democracy, if you want to be part of the democratic process and if you want to be a fully functioning member of society then you have to adhere to social norms. Those social norms are: do not commit crimes for which you need to go to gaol, in this case for longer than three years.

That is a very important message to send to the prisoner population because there are those who exist within prison who feel that prison is not necessarily a punishment. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that people commit crimes to get back into gaol because it provides them with three meals a day and a bed to sleep in. There are some who need the rigidity of the routine that exists within prisons to provide them with that discipline and that comfort in understanding what their environment looks like and that they do not have to contend with the big bad world; they essentially only need to contend with the four walls of the prison that they exist within. It also provides them with structure and with a level of security and basic life necessities that do not exist for them outside prison.

So a punishment such as this suggests to them and to those who do not see prison as something that is awful and should be avoided that they are not a functioning member of our democratic society, that they have lost the right to be a functioning member of our democratic society and that if they want to earn that privilege back then they need to keep themselves out of gaol. It is extremely important for us to provide that impetus to people, because we do have an unacceptably high incarceration rate.

More important than that, we have an unacceptably high recidivism rate. I would like to explore a little bit around our rates of recidivism in South Australia because they are the subject of a body of work that was undertaken by the former government, one that we supported in opposition, because this is one of the areas where we believe there should be a degree of bipartisanship, especially in relation to trying to make our community safer.

It is quite interesting to have this discussion amongst the community, to essentially say to them, 'Look, we don't keep people locked up forever,' unless you do something extremely bad. I think there are only really a few lifers in our criminal justice system. Ninety to 95 per cent of people who go into gaol come out, and we need those people who come out to take responsibility for their own actions to ensure they do not reoffend, but we also need our prison system, to the greatest extent that it can, to do its job to ensure that prisoners have everything that they need in order to not to reoffend.

From the research I did and the people I spoke to—and there are a lot of really good support agencies out there that help people once they get out of gaol; there are question marks about whether they have the financial capacity to do it, but there is certainly a lot of goodwill out there—a prisoner essentially needs three things. They need somewhere to live, which is fairly self-evident and, again, speaks to those who see prison as a warm bed and three square meals a day. Finding a place for them to stay is pretty important.

The second thing that is extremely important is that they have money to live on. Unfortunately, with a lot of prisoners what we are talking about is getting them access to welfare benefits. That is sad, because I think the best way to build self-esteem, to build self-worth, to build a more viable life is finding paid employment, and it should be seen as a pretty strong goal. Again, there are programs to try to deal with that but it is a pretty difficult road to head down because there is a lot of stigma—some would say justifiable stigma—around prisoners and their ability to rehabilitate into the community as well as their ability to hold down steady work. There is work that needs to be done to ensure that we continue to try to improve upon those measures.

The third and perhaps the most important thing, the most difficult thing—because there are support agencies and welfare out there to provide that safety net for people—is actually finding a bunch of friends who are not going to help you commit crimes. The bunch of mates you used to hang out with committed crimes with you in the first place. So often I have heard stories about when prisoners get out of gaol it is their mates who are out of gaol, who were there before they went in, who come and collect them and, essentially, lead them back down to the same life of crime that existed before they went into gaol.

That is extremely sad because breaking those social norms is the way we are going to be able to improve people's lives—not just the lives of the victims of the crimes these people commit but of the people themselves. As someone who has operated a small business—now a medium-sized, business before I left—in South Australia we would often see people who were trying to make that transition, people who were trying to hold down a steady job and find a group of mates who would build them up rather than tear them down, a group of mates who would head them home or to the pub or to see their family as opposed to head them out to seek drugs and commit crime as a result. That is an area we need to look at.

What this bill does is send a very clear message to those who commit crimes of severity, crimes serious enough that they receive sentences of longer than three years, 'If you want to participate in our democracy, you need to be a fully functioning member of society on the outside and continue to not commit crimes.' In South Australia our rate of reoffending is 46 per cent, and I am given to understand that that 46 per cent is essentially the number of people who, within a two-year period after having come out of prison, have reoffended.

What is interesting about that statistic is that they are a known cohort of people. We know who goes into gaol, we know who they are and when they get out. This cohort is extremely defined, and if you are looking for an at-risk group of people who are likely to reoffend you have a fifty-fifty chance that if you have been in prison before you are someone who is going to commit further crimes. We know who these people are, and that is great because it means we can help try to solve their issues. Forty-six per cent of South Australians who go into gaol reoffend.

The work that was done to try to identify the rationale behind us trying to change some of these behaviours settled around eight key things. The first of those is community safety, and in the last parliament we dealt with this with a whole series of legislation about what is the most paramount concern when it comes to sentencing people, to dealing with criminals. Very clearly community safety has to be the primary consideration, so anything we do around a criminal justice system, either inside or outside, needs to consider community safety as the most important part of what is going on. That is first and foremost in the minds of this government and that is why, in other bills currently before this house, we are seeking to ensure that committee safety stands as a paramount consideration.

Another key principle is that offender rehabilitation is an essential component of an effective criminal justice system that will result in better outcomes for offenders and ex-offenders. This idea that if we help people to change their lives once they get out of gaol, they will commit less crime is a very frustrating argument and one that I know is very difficult to prosecute in the community.

I am sure there is a great willingness within the community to punish people who are in gaol, and I get that sentiment that people should take responsibility for their actions. As a member of a party who believes in individual responsibility, I agree with that sentiment, but we also need to look at the bigger picture; that is, if we want to have less crime in our community, we need to do what we can to rehabilitate offenders.

We also need to have programs that are targeted and person centred and support individuals to achieve lasting change and desist from crime long term. Again, we need to have recognition of the fact that, if we want people to turn their lives around, we need to deal with the three basic elements they need. I remember in second-year commerce studies undertaking a human resources class. Every human resources student learns about Maslow's hierarchy of needs as it is popular human resource theory. As each of us in this place seeks to self-actualise, we all have to realise that the reason that we are able to self-actualise is because we have dealt with the needs that sit below that.

For those coming out of prison, self-actualisation is somewhere far off in the distance—it is the bit we would like to get to—but finding a place to live, having money on which to live and a group of mates who are not going to help you get back to gaol sit on the very bottom of the most fundamental parts of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which addresses the basic necessities of life, security and friendships. If we can get those building blocks right, then people, having gone to prison and coming out rehabilitated, can aim towards self-actualisation. Again, I think that is very much part of the work that we need to do.

We also need programs and policies that acknowledge the diversity of South Australia's offender population with specific responses that reflect gender and cultural difference. In this place, in the last parliament, we dealt with gender issues and gender legislation quite a lot. In seeking to homogenise our community into one androgynous being, I think we really miss out on the fact that humans are different. Men and women are different, and I think we should celebrate the differences between men and women rather than trying to make everybody the same.

But in prison we need different processes to deal with men and women. If you look at the Women's Prison set-up, it is different from a male prison and the issues are very different. Rates of mental health issues within the female prisoner population are much higher than they are for the male prisoner population. As I understand it, the rates of drug use are comparable, if not higher. Interestingly, the female prisoner population is also the fastest growing. It is why we have had capacity issues at the Women's Prison and why, as I understand it, there is work ongoing at the moment to expand the number of beds. In fact, I also understand that it is the prisoners themselves who are—

Mr GEE: Point of order: how is this relevant to prisoners voting?

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Your point of order is relevance?

Mr GEE: Yes.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I have been listening to the minister's contribution, and it does relate to the bill in the sense that he is talking about prisons and prison population, so I will continue to listen. Minister.

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL: What I could do is talk about myself and my life history for 20 minutes, but the other point I would like to make in relation to this is that service design and funding—

Members interjecting:

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL: —that's right—is outcome focused, as it seeks to achieve positive change for prisoners and offenders in the broader community. Again, this is something that is extremely important. What we are seeking to do with this legislation, and we should seek to do more broadly, is to focus on making change rather than simply feeding more inputs into the system. Whether it be health or education, or whether it be prisoner rehabilitation, there has long been a real focus on how much money we can throw at the problem. As we can see in our community and a whole host of areas, throwing more money at the problem does not necessarily fix it.

It is why we need to be outcomes focused. This is where I think this bill, which does not really cost anything, can provide a way for us to send that message, focus on outcomes and try to focus on ways in which we can change prisoner behaviour. Also important to this is monitoring and evaluation, which needs to be built into not only this bill but everything that DCS does with their programs and their policies, and having an emphasis on evidence-based and high-quality service delivery. It is extremely important that we monitor and evaluate this proposal as it sits within that broader rehabilitation and punishment system, which goes into what we try to effect and the work we do to try to get prisoners to turn their lives around.

The next part of it, where I again think that this bill is important, is that once this becomes law—I am not sure if we have heard yet whether the opposition is supporting this piece of legislation, but I am sure we will hear about it in due course—we need the community to accept that prisoner rehabilitation is an important thing. I have said that there is a real issue with trying to do that, but cross-government and whole-of-community support is needed to help do this. We need the community to change its perceptions and be willing to give prisoners a second chance.

What this bill seeks to do is send a message not only to the prisoners affected by this piece of legislation but to the broader community that all avenues to punish people are being looked at. One of the fundamental principles of our criminal justice system is that, having served that punishment, the scales have been equalised. There is a crime and there is a punishment, and once a person has completed that sentence they have essentially paid for the crime they committed.

This is part of paying for those crimes. Again, I think this is a signal to the broader community that we are exploring all options when it comes to trying to change people's lives. In doing so, hopefully we can also help the community to better understand that we need to rehabilitate prisoners not only for themselves but so that we can make the broader community safe. The last principle is around an adequate resource allocation model to ensure that we have effective implementation. This is hugely important. Again, money is often the issue, funding and resource is often the issue, but we need to make sure that money is spent as widely as possible.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I think it may upset you to know that 22 per cent of our prison population is Indigenous. That is obviously off the back of an Indigenous population of only 2 per cent. If you are Indigenous, you are 10 times more likely to go to gaol. That is extremely unfortunate. There is a really good body of work that PricewaterhouseCoopers did last year trying to understand the quantum of the problem. They came up with a series of recommendations on how to try to change that. This sits as part of the broader framework for how we try to change prisoner behaviour, such as what this bill is trying to achieve. The first recommendation they had in relation to Indigenous communities is the right of self-determination that:

…should underpin the development, implementation and ownership of strategies and initiatives to address the high rates of Indigenous incarceration.

Real change requires a strong partnership and genuine relationship between funders, the justice sector, the broader service system and the Indigenous community including Indigenous organisations. This can only be achieved when Indigenous people have a meaningful stake in the implementation, design, delivery and evaluation of solutions.

A practical first step to achieving a more meaningful role, and voice, for Indigenous communities in the implementation of strategies and initiatives is for all governments to implement policies that allow for greater self-determination, including policies that make Indigenous organisations the preferred provider for Indigenous services.

This exists to a degree within our rehabilitation and correctional services system, but we can always do better. Unfortunately, I have run out of my 20 minutes. I commend this bill to the house and look forward to its speedy unanimous passage through this place.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mr Teague.

Sitting suspended from 13:00 to 14:00.

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