The Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service and the Human Rights Law Centre have called the proposal made at the Meeting of Attorneys-General on Monday (15 November) a “missed opportunity” to look after children.

Meena Singh, Human Rights Law Centre senior advisor, said that the proposal to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 12 instead of 14 is out of step with the rest of the world.

“This proposal would see 12-year-olds – who are in grade five or grade six and only just starting to walk to school by themselves – arrested by the police, hauled before the courts and sent to prisons,” she said.

“It beggars belief that the chief law officers across the country can be so complacent when it comes to raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility to keep children safe and out of prisons. This plan, which flies in the face of all expert and international advice, will do nothing to help children and their families.”

This news follows the ACT government announcing a road map to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14 – making it the only state in the country to do so. The report, released in October, shows that raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility is necessary, achievable, and straightforward.

In other states, dozens of organisations have previously called on Attorney-General Michaelia Cash to raise the age of criminal responsibility – and according to 2019 figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, approximately 600 children under the age of 14 across the country are in Australian prisons every year.

If state and territory governments raise the age to 12 years old, 456 out of the 499 children under 14 in prison last year will remain locked away behind bars. In prison, children are strip-searched, left alone in their cells for around 12 hours a day, and regularly subject to lockdowns amounting to solitary confinement.

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The Raise the Age Coalition has condemned the decision of the Meeting of Attorneys-General to develop a plan to raise the age of criminal responsibility to only 12 years old as “inadequate and failing to improve the lives of children and young people”.

“We call on the attorneys-general to abandon this half-baked proposal and rather commit to doing the right thing by our children and community and to raise the age of criminal responsibility to at least 14 years,” they said.

“Three years ago, the Attorney-General committed to explore options to raise the age. All they have done since then is kick the can down the road, while almost 500 children under the age of 14 languished behind bars last year alone.”

The Law Council of Australia has also expressed concern regarding the government’s delay in raising the age – and president Dr Jacoba Brasch QC said that whilst the proposal was a positive step, it isn‘t enough to properly protect children around the country.

“The Law Council is concerned by the delays and short-changes inherent in the attorneys-general’s decision, including a preference to raise the age to 12 instead of 14, to consider carve-outs, and the failure to take decisive action when the evidence is clear,” she said.

“The minimum age of criminal responsibility should be raised to 14, in all jurisdictions, for all offences, without exception.”

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are disproportionately impacted by the current laws – which allow children as young as 10 to be imprisoned, arrested, and strip-searched – accounting for 65 per cent of the younger children sent to prison as a result of differential treatment and the criminalisation of disadvantage.

Nadine Miles, acting CEO of the ALS, said that the organisation is “bitterly disappointed” by the proposal and urged the NSW Parliament to raise the age to at least 14.

“This is a fig-leaf announcement designed to take pressure off politicians and give the appearance of action, without the substance,” she said.

“They know most Australians support raising the age to 14, as do Aboriginal organisations and the experts across the medical, legal, human rights and community service sectors. By putting politics over evidence, the attorneys-general are dodging their accountability to children and their constituents.”

Executive director of Save the Children’s Australian Services, Matt Gardiner, said that raising the age to 12 instead of 14 was not a “practical solution”.

“Raising the age to 14 was never an ambitious claim; this isn’t an industrial agreement where we can meet in the middle. This position is based on two decades of neuroscience that tells us that children aged 11 to 13 cannot understand the consequences of their actions.

“It is futile to treat children under 14 as if their brains were adequately developed to make comprehensive judgements and to seek to change their behaviour through punitive approaches,” he said.

“No matter how much we might wish it wasn’t so, their decision-making capacity and impulse control are not fully developed at this age. The current criminal justice system does not make the community safer; it harms the children caught up in it.”