The Victorian Criminal Bar Association supports the proposal to amend the Australian Constitution to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the First Peoples of Australia by the establishment of the Voice.

As the Uluru Statement from the Heart recognised:

Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.

The unacceptable over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in custody persists notwithstanding that more than 30 years have passed since the landmark final report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. That report examined the many ways in which our criminal justice system failed to deal justly with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander persons. It also examined the disadvantages that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander persons confronted, disadvantages that frequently continue to inform the prevailing circumstances when First Nations persons come before our criminal courts.

Whilst criminal justice primarily falls within the province of State legislatures, it does not do so exclusively. Moreover, the Commonwealth has wide scope to make laws on matters relating to, or which affect, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander persons. The Voice would provide a mechanism by which First Nations persons could communicate their views on such matters. The Victorian Criminal Bar Association – whose membership consists of barristers who prosecute criminal cases, barristers who defend persons charged with criminal offences and barristers who do both – considers that mechanism to be a fair and proportionate measure which has the very real potential to address injustices that are so often seen by those of us who practise in criminal law.

David Hallowes SC

Chair