Axe hovers over mandatory sentencing laws

THE Northern Territory’s controversial mandatory sentencing laws could soon be scrapped

THE Northern Territory’s controversial mandatory sentencing laws could soon be scrapped.

Attorney-General Natasha Fyles said the laws were being reviewed as part of a new plan aimed at reducing indigenous incarceration rates.

“We will consider removing mandatory sentencing if that’s the right thing to do, if that’s what the evidence shows,” she told Sky News.

It comes as the Federal Government announced an inquiry into rates of indigenous incarceration. “It is a sad reflection on Australia that our first peoples are so grossly over-represented in our nation’s prisons,” Senator George Brandis said when announcing the inquiry yesterday.

It’s understood that the inquiry will include a review of all 339 recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion has already offered to fund a national roll-out of the Custodial Notification Service, which sees an Aboriginal legal aid service contacted immediately when an indigenous person is taken into custody.

Ms Fyles said the Northern Territory Government’s review of its mandatory sentencing laws will be done as part of its new Aboriginal Justice Agreement, aimed at reducing the number of indigenous people in jail. “We certainly are working as efficiently as possible and I think over the next 12-18 months we’ll see reform,” she said.

Mandatory sentencing has long been the source of controversy in the NT, since the first mandatory sentencing laws for property offences were introduced by the CLP government in 1997. Three years later a 15-year-old Aboriginal boy committed suicide at the Don Dale Detention Centre after being given a mandatory 28-day sentence for stealing school supplies valued at less than $100.

Labor chief minister Clare Martin scrapped the laws after coming to office in 2001. But successive Labor and CLP Government re-introduced mandatory sentencing.