Madam Speaker, I have another example of how every time we try to increase punishments we end up disproportionately punishing disadvantaged groups in society.
For example, if we look at what has happened in the last couple of years when we got rid of the two for one credit for time spent in remand, this disproportionately affected aboriginal people. If we look at the last couple of years, the average sentence lengths for aboriginal people have increased from about 1,200 to 1,280, whereas the average sentence lengths for everyone else have not changed much at all.
That is an example of where a change in the law to increase the length of prison sentences has tended to disproportionately affect disadvantage groups. Aboriginal prisoners get longer sentences now compared to a couple of years ago. That is not true of everybody else. Therefore, they are being discriminated against.