Hansard debates

Dr READ (Brunswick) (19:13:57): (199) My adjournment matter is for the Attorney-General. The action I seek is for the minister to form a working group to establish a process to care for people found to be intoxicated in public and to establish appropriate facilities, such as sobering-up centres, instead of relying on police cells. On 22 December 2017 Tanya Day, a Yorta Yorta Aboriginal rights campaigner, died after repeatedly falling and hitting her head in the cells of Castlemaine police station. Ms Day, a mother of five, was arrested while asleep on a train for the offence of being drunk in a public place and was put in the cells to sober up. Twenty-eight years ago the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody recommended that governments abolish the offence of public drunkenness and instead create and fund sobering-up centres. Tanya Day’s uncle, Harrison Day, died in custody, and his case was one of those examined by the royal commission. Victoria is one of only two states in the country that have not implemented this particular recommendation. More Aboriginal people are now going to prison in Victoria. In fact the Sentencing Advisory Council reports that the proportion of Aboriginal people in Victoria who were in jail almost doubled over the decade between 2007 and 2017—from 950 to 1830 per 100 000 people. Prison should be a last resort. We must properly resource alternatives to police cells for those charged with minor offences such as public drunkenness. In past decades Labor governments, Attorneys-General, parliamentary committees, the Ombudsman and IBAC have all at various times called for changes to the rules for dealing with public drunkenness, but nothing has actually changed. In December the State Coroner took the unprecedented step of announcing that she too would be making a recommendation to the Attorney-General to abolish the offence of public drunkenness. After almost 28 years of political inertia, enough is enough. The government must commit to a safer option than putting drunk people in police cells. We need a working group representing Aboriginal groups, police, hospitals and drug and alcohol services to develop an alternative model. Tanya should never have died in custody, and her family deserve the peace of mind of knowing that her death led to change for the better.