Partners News

As positive COVID cases in prisons and youth detention centres escalate in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales, there’s an urgent need for Government action to protect adults and young people in prison. For the third time hundreds of legal sector professionals and organisations have signed an open letter calling for Australian governments to release people from adult and youth prisons.

The Australian Indigenous Psychologists Association (AIPA) and the Australian Psychological Society (APS) have brought together six of Australia’s peak psychology organisations to take a firm stance against racism in any form.

In a position statement released today, psychologists are standing together to call out and combat racism in the profession, the discipline and communities across Australia.

The Pathways to Justice report published by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) states that although Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults make up around 2% of the national population, they constitute 27% of the national prison population. In 2016, around 20 in every 1,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were incarcerated. Over-representation is both a persistent and growing problem—Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander incarceration rates increased 41% between 2006 and 2016, and the gap between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous imprisonment rates over that decade widened.

Responding to the National Cabinet announcement of $48.1m to support a National Mental Health and Wellbeing Pandemic Response Plan including an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ mental health and social and emotional wellbeing pandemic response plan to be developed and implemented through Indigenous leadership, Indigenous leaders look forward to positive changes.

The Centre of Best Practice in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Suicide (CBPATSISP) has joined forces with other leading mental health and suicide prevention organisations to encourage the general public to talk openly about suicide with their friends and family in a bid to save more lives.

Beyondblue, Black Dog Institute, Everymind, headspace, Lifeline, ReachOut, R U OK and CBPATSISP are launching a video for the #YouCanTalk campaign which began in July 2018.