AUSTRALIA: Domestic Corporal Punishment
Reasonable corporal punishment in the home is lawful in all Australian
states, according to anti-CP agitators GITEACPOC
.
This March
2010 news item reports that this state of affairs is to continue, and that the
Australian authorities have no intention of taking any notice of the (wholly
unelected and unaccountable) UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, which
constantly tries to mislead sovereign nations into thinking that the UN Convention
on the Rights of the Child bans corporal punishment,
which is not in fact mentioned in the Convention
at all.
At least, that is what the newspaper headline
says. A close reading of the text suggests that it is only the New South Wales
government that has specifically rejected the UNCRC's approach, but perhaps it
is taken as read that where NSW goes, the rest of the country will follow.
It was
reported in 2011 that a proposal to outlaw parental smacking in the
Australian Capital Territory (Canberra) was overwhelmingly rejected by
residents.
AUSTRALIA: Judicial and prison CP [HISTORY]
Judicial corporal punishment was used in Australia in the 19th century
and it lasted, in some states, into the middle of the twentieth.
Implements used included the
cat, the birch, the strap and the cane. The details varied from state to state.
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AUSTRALIA: Navy CP [HISTORY]
From
these May
1919 news items it is evident that the Australian Navy had on its
foundation in 1901 adopted the same regulations for the caning of boy seamen as
those applicable in the UK. However,
in about 1915 the cane was abolished for use on seagoing ships and retained
only on the training ship Tingira and at the Royal Naval College at Jervis Bay.
The definition of "serious" offences is word-for-word identical with
that of the UK regulations. The number of strokes permissible (six, nine or
twelve) is likewise the same. However, there was evidently talk
even in 1919 of abolishing CP altogether, and it is not clear whether or when
this actually happened (in Britain, caning on training ships continued until
1967).
AUSTRALIA: School CP 
The situation varies from State to State. School CP is now everywhere
banned in government schools, either by law or by administrative regulation.
Private schools in Queensland and South Australia may use CP, and a very few
have been known to do so in recent times. CP has been removed from all
schools in ACT, NSW, Tasmania and probably now Northern Territory, Victoria and
Western Australia. Following are the details by State.
Australian Capital Territory: According to this 1997 statement by the state government ,
CP has been banned since 1988 in state schools and was said to have fallen into
disuse in Anglican and Catholic schools, but possibly at that time was still
used by some other private schools. GITEACPOC says
that it was outlawed in all ACT schools by the Education Act 2004.
New South Wales: CP was abolished in state schools in 1986 and reintroduced in 1988 before
being again outlawed in 1995. NSW was unusual in that all canings in government
schools, even of boys, were administered to the hands. Since NSW is the
dominant state, and Sydney arguably the media capital of the whole country,
this has given rise to a myth that all CP in Australia was on the hand,
which is not the case.
In private schools in NSW (many of which were
rather "British" and generally caned boys on the backside), CP was
banned in 1997.
Northern Territory: A December
2004 document by
the Australian Institute of Family Studies claimed that the NT was by then the
only part of Australia where CP had not been banned in government schools. This
remains the case, but an April 2010
news item quotes the Education Minister as saying that CP is contrary to official
policy and is not used.
In private ("non-government") schools
in the NT, it is now a condition of official registration that CP be explicitly
rejected, according to this 2017 document [DOC] (New
URL). Since it is a legal requirement that all such schools be
registered, this amounts to a complete ban on CP.
Queensland: The official implement was the cane, restricted since 1934 to boys only. CP was
abolished by regulation in state schools in 1995 (see external links below) but
is still available to private schools, Two or Three of which, especially
Christian schools, state that
they use it. As of June 2012 the state government had no
intention of banning it.
South Australia: a 1956 news report claimed that CP of girls was
banned. CP was reportedly abolished in state schools in 1982, although another
report said in 1990 that it was still by then only in the process of being
phased out. CP is still lawful in both public (government) and private schools;
in government schools it was banned by administrative regulation, not by
legislation. In Oct 2008 it was reported that the state government was
proposing to ban it by law, but in 2012 there were
no plans to forbid private schools from using it. And yet GITEACPOC now claims
that CP was outlawed in private schools in 2011. These statements cannot both
be correct. Meanwhile, the only school known in recent years to have publicly
stated that it used CP now appears to have ceased to do so.
Tasmania: Corporal punishment was abolished in all schools in 1999, not in
1994 as claimed by GITEACPOC.
Victoria: the strap on the hand (boys only; girls were exempt) was the official method in
state schools; it was abolished in
1983. The state government was reported in 2006 to be in the process of
abolishing CP in private schools, not directly but by making registration of
each school conditional upon its absence: see this Dec 2005 news item and these Feb 2006 follows-up. It is assumed
that this process has now been completed; at all events there appears to be no
evidence that CP is still in use anywhere in Victoria. There have been the
usual calls for its return, as in this Apr
2012 news item.
Western Australia: banned in all government schools since 1987, but was found in
2014 to be still in use at at least two private Christian schools. In
mid-2012 it was
reported that the state government had no plans to outlaw it, but in July 2014
it said it would be prepared to do so if the public demanded it. One media
report has claimed that this indeed happened at the start of 2016, but as of
its Nov 2017 update that had not been corroborated by GITEACPOC.
EXTERNAL LINKS: (these will open in a new window)
Discipline in Secondary Schools in Western Australia [HISTORY]
New!
Report of a government committee in 1972. Remarkably
detailed -- there are 380 pages of it, including a lot of interesting surveys
and statistics.
Violence: directions for Australia [HISTORY]
1990 document from the Australian Institute of Criminology. Note the assumed
polarisation to the extremes: we are told that some authorities regard CP as
"essential", while others oppose it as "archaic and
excessive". Is it not at least possible that most reasonable people regard
it as neither of these things, but somewhere in the large gap between the two?
Anyway, according to this, CP was restored in New South
Wales in November 1988 and was evidently still lawful there in 1990.
Extracts from the regulations of the Department of Education [HISTORY]
A timeline setting out the development of the rules for school CP in
Queensland.
Education history - Legal aspects [HISTORY]
Also from the Queensland government, a short history of school CP in the state,
mentioning some relevant legal cases. There is a photograph of a cane broken in
two, presumably symbolising the 1995 abolition. On this continuation page is an extract from a school punishment book in
1936.
Education Regulations 2000 [PDF]
These are the rules for the State of Victoria under which corporal punishment
was prohibited in state (but not private) schools.