The complete response, after three months’ consideration, by the Minister for Social Services the Hon. Dan Tehan MP to the Australian Law Reform Commission report Pathways to Justice—An Inquiry into the Incarceration Rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, which the Australian Government commissioned on 10 February 2017 and received on 22 December 2017 and which was finally tabled in Parliament on 27 March 2018, concerning the disproportionately high rates of incarceration among Aboriginal and Torres Strait people (despite being around 2% of the Australian population, in 2016, Indigenous Australian men were 15 times more likely to be in prison than non-Indigenous men, and Indigenous women were 21 times more likely to be in prison than non-Indigenous women) which costs Australia an estimated $7.9 billion every year, not counting the harm to individuals, families and communities, and is agreed by many organisations to be ‘a national disgrace.’  Continue reading →