Pacific Island juveniles

face their crimes

By John Uri

number of Pacific Islander young people entering the justice system. As administra tor of the Youth Justice Conferencing scheme, Ms Ponifasio is too aware of the breakdown in relationships between parents and children.

She believes that young people’s views must be heard at community forums.

However she admitted that this is not always possible because the Pacific culture includes a tradition of respect for elders.

Through YJC, parents of offenders are expected to play a major role in the early phase of the mediation process. Because the YJC scheme is perceived as an important stepping stone for first or second-time offenders, it is vital that parents take control of the situation from the start.

The scheme works-on the understanding that if further crimes are committed, the end result could be costly with offenders likely to reappear before a magistrate. In NSW, the YJC scheme is unique because the processes involved, when mediation is established, closely resembles the way Pacific Island parents deal with conflicts particularly the way they discipline their children.

The involvement of the police and the court system is limited during the reconcili ation process between offender and victim.

Instead, the offender appears before a conference convenor, with a parent, friend or representative. At these sessions, offend ers come face to face with their victims.

The aim of the mediation is to allow the offender to seek compromise or an agree able punishment appropriate to the crimes committed. This may involve just declaring a simple apology to the victim or an under taking to do community work.

The scheme has enormous benefits for both the victims and the offenders, however the major beneficiary is the offender who avoids expensive legal litigation and processes. At a time when legal aid funds are being phased out by the Howard gov ernment, these conferencing schemes will

appeal mainly to families on low income or those who are uncomfortable with the harsh realities of the court system. It seems that gradually Maori and Pacific Islander par ents will come to endorse the merits of the scheme, however, only time will tell whether the scheme has any long-term influence on first and second-time offend ers.

Although the YJC scheme is still in its infancy, most Pacific Islander groups at the forum believe that, in addition, more educa tional programmes for parents ought to be initiated. However, they argue that if there was a likelihood of a co-ordinated effort to reduce the number of offenders entering, the system, the government must also find a solution to the social and economic prob lems facing Pacific Islander families.

In the outlying cities of Sydney, such as Blacktown, Mt. Druitt, Werrington, Macquarie Fields, Campbelltown and St Mary’s, where most Maori and Pacific Islander communities reside, unemploy ment seems to be an important factor - par ticularly for young school leavers.

Unemployment is therefore a key eco nomic issue for Pacific people.

There also seems to be a reluctance by the Australian government to initiate a com prehensive analysis of the economic conse quences of Pacific settlement and migration in Sydney.

Despite 25-30 years of Pacific migration in Australia, it is still incredible to find that official statistics continue to regard Pacific Islanders as minority groups or recent arrivals.lt is this distortion of the Pacific population that is making their economic position difficult to argue.

In a sense, they are minorities if the sta tistics are viewed empirically or compared to other migrant groups on a State-wide basis. But when the figures are viewed from a regional or local level, their numbers stand out.

In the long run, though, the dilemma fac ing Pacific Islander young people lies with whether major Pacific Islander groups can work co-operatively to enhance and

improve their socio-economic position.

Since 1996, welfare and community development funding to the Tongan and Fijian communities have been significantly reduced. This was despite repeated advice to the Federal Government that the popula tion of these and other islander groups had doubled in the past 10 years.

The scale of these funded schemes is minuscule and unable to cover the geo graphical spread of the community in Sydney.

The recent forum highlighted another side of the struggles and barriers con fronting Pacific Islanders. Strategically, Pacific Islanders have no single voice in Sydney so that any likelihood of a co-ordi nated effort - to pursue recommendations arising out of partnership consultations with government institutions - will more than likely fail.

An underlying problem is the tremen dous inability to speak openly on social and political issues. It is this reticence in the Pacific community that has frustrated many Islanders. In turn, they constantly blame their community leaders for failing to take an active role outside the realm of the com munity.

The result is that successive govern ments have become accustomed to issuing band-aid assistance to Pacific Islander com munities, thus ignoring the wider social and economic problems arising from migration and unemployment.

The real test for Pacific Islander commu nities is whether they can achieve stronger solidarity when confronted with the chang ing nature of government policies that seem to ignore their plight year to year.

Pacific Island communities cannot adopt a wait-and-see attitude forever. Many of the problems facing young people could have been avoided had the church and communi ty leaders spent more time developing structural programmes that included, rather than excluded, young people.

Service providers, the police, media and court system are not in the business of dis tinguishing whether a young offender is Fijian, Cook Islander or Samoan. In their eyes, these figures are all the same.

This is inevitably the way Pacific Islanders have been portrayed, written about and articulated in the media in the past three decades.

It is for these reasons that Pacific com munities in Australia must find a way to work together, now more than ever. ■