Deduct fines from welfare to spare people jail: Christian Porter

State-based fines could be deducted from federal welfare payments as a way of tackling indigenous imprisonment rates.

Attorney-General Christian Porter in Sydney. Picture: John Feder.

State-based fines could be deducted from federal welfare payments as a way of tackling soaring indigenous imprisonment rates.

Attorney-General Christian Porter will discuss the reform with his state and territory counterparts. “We can’t let a situation persist where there is non-payment of fines causing elevated bouts of indigenous imprisonment in some jurisdictions,” he said.

Mr Porter said the fundamental way to address soaring indigenous imprisonment rates was “ensuring better lives for indigenous members of our community”, but some issues “could be dealt with positively and quickly”.

“Fines enforcement is clearly one of them and one that I’ll be talking to the state attorneys-­general about,” he said.

One proposal that had “merit”, he said, was imposing periodic ­deductions from welfare payments of fines, to prevent those on benefits serving time in prison.

The indigenous imprisonment rate is 15 times higher than that of other Australians, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data. The figures show Western Australia has the highest rates. About 800 people a year entered the WA prison system for unpaid fines from July 2006 to June 2015, ­according to a Law Council of Australia paper.

Mr Porter, who was WA ­attorney-general before entering federal parliament, said in WA a “great number” of indigenous ­people spent “short, but obviously not insignificant, periods of time in jails in lieu of paying fines”, and there was room for “significant ­improvement” in this area.

As social services minister, Mr Porter last year introduced legislation to deduct rent from welfare payments to social housing tenants so they were not evicted.

A spokeswoman for WA Attorney-General John Quigley said the state was “talking to the commonwealth” about the proposal but the minister had previously stated deductions would have to be “modest”.

Institute of Public Affairs director of policy Simon Breheny said it was “a very good idea” to gradually deduct money from welfare payments to recover fines.

“Deducting fines imposed by state legal systems ... is a sensible and practical step towards the reduction of ­incarceration rates,” Mr Breheny said.

Rob Hulls, director of the Centre for Innovative Justice at RMIT University, said jailing disadvantaged people for non-payment of fines was “totally inappropriate”, and in some cases turned “a minor summary offence into a death ­sentence”. He warned that Mr Porter’s “thought bubble” could result in vulnerable people becoming homeless because they could not pay their rent. There were better ways to tackle the problem, he said, including measures to help people avoid coming into contact with the justice system.