Swing and a miss: funding gaps hit scheme slashing crime rates

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This was published 11 years ago

Swing and a miss: funding gaps hit scheme slashing crime rates

By Rick Feneley

Boxing police at dawn has saved some of Redfern's most troubled indigenous youth from a life of crime and prison but a loss of funding is on the brink of forcing the program to shut down.

Redfern's police commander, Superintendent Luke Freudenstein, credited it with an 80 per cent drop in juvenile robberies in the first year after he and local indigenous leaders established their boxercise project, Clean Slate Without Prejudice, at the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence in 2009. Now, he can compare 100-plus robberies a month in the bad old days with three in December, or six in February.

But the federal government grant of $300,000 that launched the program - and which was stretched from the intended two years to three - ran out in December.

Shane Phillips, one of the indigenous founders of Clean Slate, warns: ''Kids who have been diverted from crime could end up back in trouble, and then their friends, and then another generation.

''We asked the state Attorney-General, Greg Smith, for help. He told us, 'This is the best program I've seen.' But he said he had no money in his budget for it. We've had 50 or more kids through the program. Think of the cost to the state of putting just one or two of them in jail. That would cover the shortfall in our funding.''

When Fairfax Media attended a Clean Slate workout in November, 20-year-old Jacob Saunders said: ''It's given me a second chance in life, a chance that not many people in my shoes ever get.''

Mr Phillips, named as Australia's Local Hero in this year's Australian of the Year awards, also runs an Aboriginal social enterprise called Tribal Warrior, which - with no government funding - gives maritime training to people and leads them to jobs. Tribal Warrior had been risking its own existence to fund Clean Slate, at the expense of its other projects, Mr Phillips said. At the end of the week, it will stop paying the five indigenous mentors critical to Clean Slate.

The mentors turn up before 6am three days a week for the exercise program, when about 45 people - 20 of them indigenous youth - turn up to spar with friends and police, including Superintendent Freudenstein. But Mr Phillips said the mentors then worked for up to 40 hours a week, for as little as $400, ensuring youth went on to school or jobs after their workouts. He said he needed at least $300,000 in funding to pay them.

Superintendent Freudenstein declined to enter the debate about who should fund the program, but he did say: ''If we don't have the mentors, we don't have a program.''

A spokeswoman for Mr Smith said his department worked closely with Aboriginal communities on several programs to reduce crime. While it had no extra funds now, ''we would encourage the federal government to continue funding the Clean Slate Without Prejudice program''. Mr Phillips has pleaded again with the federal government.

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