Indigenous Justice Clearinghouse Forum

Matthew was born and raised in Sydney, he is a Descendant of the Muruwari People from Northwest NSW.

Matthew is a dancer, musician, songman, didgeridoo (Yiḏaki) player, cultural consultant and educator with over 30 years of experience in the performing arts across all genres.

He has toured extensively in Australia and abroad performing in many countries as both a soloist and as a collaborator.

Matthew has recorded both his own music and co composed music. He has been a Cultural Consultant for Bangarra Dance Theatre and worked with Grandmaster Shakuhachi Player Riley Lee, James Morrison, Colin Offord, TAIKOZ, Legs on the Wall, Sydney and Queensland Symphony Orchestras and the Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

Matthew currently works with Jannawi Dance Clan and The Gamay Dancers and has recently appeared on the Voice, performing with Jessica Mauboy. Matthew has also been working in the Indigenous arts in education for the last 20 years and sits on the Indigenous Advisory Panel for the City of Sydney Council.

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Dr Fiona Allison is a Research Fellow working at the Cairns Institute, JCU, and Jumbunna, Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, UTS. Fiona has been working with communities implementing justice reinvestment since 2015, including in the NT (Katherine) and QLD (Cherbourg). She is also the Chair of Justice Reinvestment Network Australia, which brings together community leaders and others working to progress justice reinvestment in Australia. Fiona’s research is primarily focused on improving social justice and justice outcomes, particularly for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including through health justice partnerships, whole-of-community collaboration, and community development approaches. Prior to working in universities, Fiona was a practicing lawyer working in Community Legal Centres in the NT and NSW and at the Australian Human Rights Commission. She has also taught legal studies to adult students at Tranby, an Aboriginal community-controlled education centre based in Glebe, Sydney.

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Professor Chris Cunneen is a Champion of Just Reinvest NSW and a Professor of Criminology with the University of Technology Sydney. He has a national and international reputation as a leading criminologist specialising in juvenile justice, restorative justice, policing, prison issues, human rights and First Nations peoples and the law. He coauthored the book Justice Reinvestment. Winding Back Imprisonment (Palgrave, 2016). Chris has participated with a number of Australian Royal Commissions and Inquiries (including the Stolen Generations Inquiry, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the National Inquiry into Racist Violence). He taught criminology at Sydney Law School (1990-2005) where he was appointed as Professor in 2004. He was also the Director of the Institute of Criminology (1999-2005) at the University of Sydney.

Professor Cunneen has held research positions with the Indigenous Law Centre, University of New South Wales (UNSW), and the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. Between 2006 and 2010 he was the New South Wales Global Chair in Criminology at UNSW. He was Professor of Justice and Social Inclusion at the Cairns Institute, James Cook University. He continues as an honorary professor at JCU and UNSW. Since 2018 Chris has been Professor of Criminology at Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, University of Technology Sydney.

Alistair Ferguson is the Executive Director and Founder of Maranguka, the first major Justice Reinvestment initiative in Australia. In 2008, Maranguka – meaning ‘caring for others’, was established with the aim of improving outcomes and creating better coordinated support for vulnerable families and children through the true empowerment of the local Aboriginal community.

The Maranguka Justice Reinvestment Project in Bourke, NSW, was established in 2013. It is the first major justice reinvestment project in Australia.

Once the Maranguka Initiative was established, the Maranguka Backbone Community Organisation was formed with the Bourke Tribal Council as the voice for Bourke’s Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander People.

Alistair’s position of Executive Director has been funded by the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation and the Dusseldorp Skills Forum.

Key to Alistair’s community development is the belief in seeing communities truly empowered and taking responsibility for their own issues and plight. In 2015, in recognition of 20 years of work for his community in Bourke, and in particular for his leadership on the Maranguka Justice Reinvestment Project, Alistair received the

Aboriginal Justice Award at the Law and Justice Foundation of NSW Justice Awards. Alistair is also a Public Innovator recognised by the Harwood Institution.

Alistair was recognised as the driving force behind collaborations between government and nongovernment organisations including Father Chris O'Reilly's Youth off the Streets, Eternity Aid, Bourke Aboriginal Health Service, St Vincent de Paul, Jesuit Social Services, and the National Adult Literacy Campaign 'Yes I Can' Bourke.

He was also part of the negotiations for the Wangkumara language program, which paved the way for the first Aboriginal language program in the NSW high school curriculum.

Alistair’s commitment to his community also led him to co-establish the Bourke Alcohol Working Group to address alcohol misuse in Bourke. This led to the successful implementation plan to introduce Alcohol Restrictions.

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Sarah Hopkins is Co-Chair of Just Reinvest NSW and the Managing Solicitor of Justice Projects at the Aboriginal Legal Service ACT/NSW. She is an accredited specialist in criminal law and has lectured in criminal law at the University of NSW. Sarah has been working alongside the Bourke community since 2012 in support of the Maranguka Justice Reinvestment Project in Bourke, which was the recipient of the 2015 National Rural Law and Justice Award. In 2019 Just Reinvest NSW was the recipient of both the HESTA Community Organisation Award and the Australian Human Rights Commission Community Organisation Award.

Sarah is Co-Chair of the NSW Closing the Gap Justice Targets Officer Level Working Group and a member of the NSW Bar Association’s Joint Working Party on the Over-representation of Indigenous People in the NSW Criminal Justice System. Throughout her career Sarah has served on numerous committees including the Criminal Law Committee of the Law Society of NSW, the Steering Committee for the Red Cross Vulnerability Report 2015, and as Vice President of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties. In 2017 Sarah was named the Community Lawyer of the Year by the Women Lawyers’ Association of NSW.

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Skye is a proud mother and First Nations woman who is currently completing a PhD in Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS) and models of care for high risk young people, at the University of NSW. Additionally, she is the CEO of Kowa and Blak Impact Lead at the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence in Redfern.

Skye has a strong passion for embedding IDS into practice; and combine this with my professional objective to support First Nations communities, organisations and peoples to applying measurable, contextualised and evidence-based approaches to systems change.

Skye is a First Nations researcher who has contributed to numerous evaluations and research projects including place-based Collective Impact and government initiatives.

Prior to embarking on a degree in psychology, I worked as a comprehensive nurse in acute psychiatric and surgical nursing in Dunedin, Auckland and Sydney. Nursing taught me many practical and ‘coal face’ skills and provided a great foundation for my next career as a clinical psychologist.

I have an undergraduate degree in psychology from Otago University and trained in clinical psychology at the University of Auckland. Upon registration as a clinical psychologist, I worked intensively with adolescents with harmful sexual behaviours and children with conduct problems for over 10 years, prior to joining the clinical psychology programme as a staff member. Much of this work involved outdoor wilderness therapy and family therapy.

I have over 30 years’ experience working as a clinical psychologist specialising in children and adolescents – I suppose I thought it was where I could have the biggest impact on changing kids’ lives around and giving them a better future.

As both a clinical psychologist and academic, I have worked alongside a number of government departments including the New Zealand Fire Service, Police, Department of Corrections and Oranga Tamarki, as well as community groups, and my students have also helped these organisations with their projects, to ensure well-grounded, real-world research outputs.

I sit on a number of government committees and now work part-time at the university. In the other part of my job, I am Chief Science Advisor for the Justice Sector (this role spans the Ministry of Justice, Police and Department of Corrections) and advise government on ways to improve the justice system for those whom it serves.

In 2020 I was made an Officer of The New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for services to Youth Justice and Clinical Psychology.

Deb Moyle is a proud Ngarrindjeri woman who lives and breathes indigenous-led solutions to matters impacting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. As a Red Cross Project Manager for Justice Reinvestment projects, she has lead the development of the Port Adelaide Aboriginal Leadership group together with Justice Reinvestment SA to lead and monitor justice and Aboriginal family wellbeing.

Dean Mosquito is a Gija and Jaru man. Dean is one of the founding members of the Youth Engagement Night Officer (YENO) program in Halls Creek.

As part of the YENO team, Dean goes out from 9pm - 4am to walk the streets of Halls Creek and ensures the safety of the children that are out at night.

Over the past year, the YENO team have successfully built bonds with the children of Halls Creek, acting as role models and encouraging them to go home so they can go to school the next day. This is Justice Reinvestment in action - smart justice for healthy families and safe communities.

Jude is a Gomeroi woman with almost four decades of experience working with education, disabilities, child protection, age care and juvenile justice.

“What I want to see is less young people before the criminal justice system in Moree. I want the young people to help build our community and utilise their strength and knowledge to empower themselves to make this place a better place, for themselves and everyone else in this community for many years to come so their children and grandchildren can benefit from having a safer, stronger community. JR in Moree is putting young peoples’ voices at the centre. It’s about giving mine, yours, our children and young people a say, listening to them, making them feel heard and valued, someone is listening.”

“My mob are very resilient Mob, country tough and staunch, fighters, never give up, so it’s hoped through this approach with Justice Reinvestment having whole of community involved in leading decision and assistance involving especially the young people help build bigger and better pathways for everyone.”

“It’s is important the children and young people in our community are given every opportunity to grow, be independent and strong leaders as they are the future.”

Professor Lorana Bartels (BA LLB LLM PhD GDLP GCTE) was the Criminology Program Leader at the ANU from May 2019 to September 2020. She was previously Head of the School of Law and Justice at the University of Canberra and has also worked at the Australian Institute of Criminology, Family Court of Australia, NSW Attorney-General's Department, NSW Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and NSW Public Defenders Office.

Professor Bartels is an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Canberra and University of Tasmania, a Life Member of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law and joint winner of the 2018 ACT Woman Lawyer of the Year - Community & Academic Award.

She is a member of the number of committees including; ACT Reducing Recidivism Advisory Group; Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology (ANZSOC); After Prison Network (ACT representative); Australian Lawyers for Human Rights; National Sentencing Network Leadership Committee (ACT representative); SHINE for Kids Research Practice and Advocacy Advisory Group; and Women Lawyers Association ACT. She is co-chair of the ACT chapter of the Justice Reform Initiative and a member of the Justice Reform Initiative's national board. She is also a member of the editorial boards of the Alternative Law Journal, Criminal Law Journal (ACT Editor and Sentencing Editor), International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology and SAGE Handbook of Domestic Violence. She was previously a member of the ANZSOC Management Committee (2008-15) and Prisoners Aid ACT Management Committee (2016-2020).

Professor Bartels’ publications include four books and over 100 refereed journal articles, book chapters and conference papers, as well as consultancy reports for the ACT Chief Magistrate, ACT Supreme Court, ACT Justice and Community Safety Directorate, Corrections Victoria, Indigenous Justice Clearinghouse and Tasmanian Sentencing Advisory Council.