Mandatory sentencing: it isn't over
In spite of Senate and United Nations reports finding mandatory sentencing laws are in breach of international conventions, and in spite of the Senate's March 15 adoption of a private member's bill overturning such laws as they apply to juveniles in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, Prime Minister John Howard has ruled that the laws will stay.
Using its numbers in the House of Representatives, debate on Australian Greens senator Bob Brown's private member's bill has been gagged and delayed by the Coalition, possibly indefinitely. Two compromise bills, presented by Liberal MP Danna Vale and independent Peter Andren, which overruled mandatory sentencing laws for juveniles only in the NT, have also been ruled out, as has a "conscience vote" for Coalition MPs.
An article on mandatory sentencing laws in Green Left Weekly on March 1 concluded that the response of Howard and his ministers to the Senate inquiry would "show just how low they're prepared to sink". The answer, evidently, is as low as you can go.
The Senate inquiry's report stated that, in the opinion of the ALP/Democrat committee majority, mandatory minimum sentencing is "not appropriate in a modern democracy that values human rights and it contravenes the Convention on the Rights of the Child". Given that "the Committee does not believe that the Northern Territory and Western Australian governments will act on their own volition", it recommended that Brown's bill be adopted.
The committee's report is mild-mannered, even pedantic and falls far short of the recommendations put to it by Aboriginal legal and welfare services, which deal with the daily impact of the laws. For instance, the committee did not find that mandatory sentencing regimes breach the Convention for the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination by disproportionately affecting Aborigines, on the grounds that the disproportion, while worsened by mandatory sentencing, existed long before the laws were enacted and that "the laws clearly target those offences that have been prevalent within communities, and not a particular race of offenders".
Nevertheless, the report does document just how harshly the laws have hit Aboriginal communities in the NT and WA. It manages to compare the various, often conflicting, statistics in the NT, including belatedly produced figures from the NT government.
Even by the NT government's account, the disproportionate and heavy impact is clear. For example, since the law's introduction in 1997, the number of adult males received at prisons has increased from 910 to 1509 (up 66%). Non-indigenous male receptions increased by 39%, indigenous ones by 70%.
And the report shows how little rational argument or evidence there is that mandatory minimum sentences work. The best that the WA and NT governments can come up with are that they aren't overtly discriminatory and that they were a response to strong community sentiment against certain types of crime.
The two Liberals on the committee, "moderates" Marise Payne and Helen Coonan, could certainly find no arguments for the laws. Their minority report finds mandatory sentencing "objectionable in principle" and differs little from the majority report except in its recommendation, which is to reject Brown's bill.
Coonan believes the matter should be left to the NT and WA governments while Payne believes that federal intervention should occur, but only if nothing has changed a year or so down the track. Howard seems to share much the same view: he acknowledges that mandatory sentencing laws are wrong but goes out of his way to keep them in place.
A high-level diplomatic mission was even sent to New York and Geneva to pressure the UN into not requesting that the mandatory sentencing legislation be overturned and into toning down a UN Human Rights Commission report which found the laws breached numerous international human rights stipulations.
Howard did, however, allow a "debate" in the Coalition party room, at which Vale put forward her compromise bill. Ten Liberal "moderates" spoke in favour of it. That's enough, with Andren and Labor, to pass the bill, if those Liberals had the courage to cross the floor — which they do not.
Government policy on this issue is now to replace hypocrisy with cynicism. It has given up arguing that the laws are just and fair, acknowledged that they are the opposite — and is now doing everything in its power to keep the laws on the books, and thereby keep the One Nation racist vote.
But if, having successfully cowed spineless "moderates" in his own party and having used his numbers to bury Brown's bill, the prime minister believes the issue will now go away, he's mistaken.
This isn't over. It's not over for all the Aboriginal people who face the unjust laws, and who will continue to fight against them. And it shouldn't be over for any supporter of human rights and justice. The protests will — must — continue.