Description

The speaker, who is the Chief Justice of New South Wales, recalls that he was associated with Charles Perkins on the 1965 Freedom Ride, which first made the issue of systematic discrimination against Aborigines front page news in Australia. While much has changed for the better in Aboriginal affairs, the involvement of Aborigines in the criminal justice system remains a focal point of debate. Fourteen years after the report of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the proportion ofAborigines in our prisons has increased. While Aboriginal persons have a higher probability of offending than the rest of the population, a fact that is often ignored is that the overwhelming majority of the victims of Aboriginal crimes are other Aborigines. If we wish to reduce the over-representation of Aborigines, particularly young Aboriginal men, in the prison population, the most important thing that we have to do is to reduce levels of Aboriginal offending, and the law has a significant but limited role to play in achieving this goal. Noting that our sentencing and rehabilitation processes for Aboriginal offenders are not achieving the objective of deterrence, the speaker indicates his strong support for the system of circle sentencing, which was trialled in Nowra and has now been extended to a number of other centres. There is a good deal of evidence now that sentences which carry the support of the elders of the local Aboriginal community have a much greater impact on the individual offender than any sentence imposed by a white magistrate. The apparent success of circle sentencing with respect to rates of re-offending, together with the widespread acceptance by victims of the process and its outcomes, is a very real ray of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape of criminal offending by young Aborigines. The speaker also discusses the future course of the reconciliation process, arguing that millions of Australians have an Aboriginal ancestor, even though this important fact may have been suppressed in the past. The reconciliation process will be substantially advanced if persons with Aboriginal ancestry take steps to identify those origins and take pride in finding them. Reconciliation cannot succeed if it is based, contrary to historical fact, solely on maintaining a rigid and categorical distinction between black and white.