There are renewed calls this morning to raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility around Australia to at least fourteen. Currently, the ACT is the only state where children younger than fourteen can't be charged, convicted, or incarcerated on criminal offences.
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00:00 The evidence is pretty shocking with respect to the impact of incarceration and the criminal
00:09 legal system on young children's brains, their physical health and their mental and emotional
00:16 wellbeing. We see time and time again that children who are incarcerated at a young age,
00:24 so everywhere except for the ACT, as young as 10, that there is a great deal of trauma,
00:32 a great deal of fear and a great deal of psychological impacts as well as physical health as well
00:40 that is so detrimental to their long-term wellbeing. Each state and territory must make
00:45 the decision themselves to pass laws to raise the age to 14 and we're seeing and we're hearing
00:52 in our meetings with politicians that there's a sense of fear and resistance in their electorates,
01:02 in their constituents and across the community for what it might mean if the age is raised
01:08 to 14. And to that I would really just say these children are so young, their brains
01:14 are not fully developed to be able to navigate criminal consequence and long-term consequence
01:20 of their behaviour and so we're treating them as criminals without their ability to understand
01:28 what it is that they're doing and so we're creating this vicious cycle of consistent
01:34 criminalisation of really young children, particularly First Nations children and children
01:38 with disabilities and it's setting them up to fail by doing so instead of being able
01:44 to support these kids, care and nurture for them in their communities where they belong.
01:49 We need to make sure that we are prioritising the lives of these young children and working
01:56 really tangibly with organisations like ours and there are countless others who have supported
02:01 this campaign for a long time to make sure that that legislative change is 14, that there
02:07 are no carve-outs and that these kids have the support that they need.
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