00:00I think this is not a party political thing.
00:04I think that we see in some jurisdictions where youth crime is seen to be a bit of a
00:11political football, that everyone tries to sound tougher than the other side.
00:17And that sort of plays well, I guess, politically.
00:21But I think what we need to do, and I'd encourage the public to be asking the question, where
00:26is the evidence that any of these ideas are going to work to keep the community safer?
00:31What I'm calling for is for our leaders on all sides to have the courage to say all the
00:38evidence shows we've got it wrong.
00:41We've approached the problem of youth crime by tinkering at the justice end, but no more
00:46policing and more incarceration of children.
00:50All of that will not work to keep the community safer.
00:54That's what we've shown here in Australia and it's been shown internationally.
00:58What we need to do is to focus on the underlying drivers of this kind of negative behaviour
01:04and address things like the poverty, the homelessness, the disadvantage, the disabilities that the
01:10majority of these children have, often leading to their disengagement from school.
01:15And if a child's not at school, where are they?
01:18They're likely to be on the streets and to be getting involved in negative behaviours.
01:24I've spoken to 150 of these children for this project, for a report that's being tabled
01:31in Parliament next month, and they were in prisons or in the community, and you can see
01:37that they are kids who are missing the basic needs in life.
01:42And so, in a way, the crime—you can understand the crime better as a cry for help to address
01:48the basic needs of children.
01:49So we have collectively failed them and we need to collectively work together, I believe,
01:55as a federation to prevent these problems occurring.
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