Newspaper for Prisoners to be launched in Australia

Newspaper for Prisoners to be launched in Australia

By: Eric McGraw

In Australia, prisoners have lost the vote – a right established in 1902 for a limited number of prisoners. By 1938, voting rights were expanded to include prisoners sentenced to less then 5 years and in 1995 legislation was passed which gave thousands of additional prisoners the right to vote and portable voting booths had to be placed in prisons across the country.

This small gain for prisoner’s rights was unfortunately short lived. In 2004, legislation was changed so that only those imprisoned for less than three years had a right to vote. Although this was a major step backwards it was nothing compared to what was to come next; in June 2006, legislative changes officially banned all convicted prisoners from voting.

Eric Abetz, the government minister responsible, told the media….’if you are not fit to walk the streets…then chances are you’re not a fit and proper person to cast a vote in relation to the future of your country’. Prisoners are of course more likely to vote Labour then Liberal - which means that John Howard’s ‘Liberal’ government has stopped all prisoners from casting their votes.

It is ironic that prisoners in Australia lost their voting rights at roughly the same time as the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the UK voting ban on convicted prisoners was a breach of their human rights.

Brett Collins, the director of Justice Action in Sydney, told Inside Time: ‘prisoners should be supervised and managed with an emphasis on their continuing part in the community not their exclusion from it…. We are currently gathering material to confront the Australian government in the coming months.’

Inspired by Inside Time, Justice Action launched a tabloid newspaper called JUST US - A VOICE FOR PRISONERS which will go to its third edition shortly. They had circulated 47 editions of their earlier prisoner publication “Framed” over 15 years until it was banned, and ran a constitutional court challenge to force an election special into the prisons. Lawyers are poised to defend the right of Australian prisoners to receive the latest edition of JUST US. It will, they say, be the only arena left in which prisoners can express themselves.