Indigenous county court gets green light
The first county court for Victoria’s Aboriginal community has been given a lifeline by the state’s attorney general to continue beyond its four-year pilot project status. It’s a move that has been welcomed by members of the legal community, who have been campaigning for months to get the outcome. Two decades after the Royal Commission into the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which established the need to reduce the over-representation of Aboriginal Australians in the criminal justice system, there have been efforts in various states to develop more culturally appropriate sentencing systems for Indigenous Australians. But commentators say the performance of Indigenous courts – and attitudes towards them – can vary region to region based on funding and community involvement.