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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 12 Hansard (7 December) . . Page.. 3895 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

I would also like to have the record show appreciation to the governments of Western Australia, the Northern Territory and South Australia for their hospitality and the freedom with which they dispensed their information to us. I would also like to express my appreciation to Mr Kaine. It was a long trip. It was a very involved trip. We did a lot of work and we were given a lot of information, and the information that we shared enabled us to come up with this report. Finally, I commend the report to the house. It is a damn good read.

MR KAINE (7. 56): I need to speak only briefly. I think Mr Hargreaves has made the salient points about this report. All I need to say is that what we have here is a distillation of opinion from people in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, both corrections officers and bureaucrats, with some input from the political level. We went on our visit particularly to look at prison philosophy, to look at whether private prisons or public prisons, however you define them, were preferred and the reasons why, and to look at the question of the interests of female prisoners. We had reached the conclusion in our earlier visits that, for the ACT, the care and custody of female prisoners was going to be a problem because of very small numbers. Indeed, the number of women in any prison system in Australia is very small relative to the total prison population.

We found, by and large, that women in the prison system, as perhaps women would say in the community generally, are marginalised because of small numbers. Prisons are generally designed and operated and run for the majority of their population - men. To the extent that there are opportunities in prisons and in the prison system, those opportunities are not equally available to women and men. How we treat our women prisoners, how we house them, how we manage them, how we make resources available for rehabilitation and the like are matters of some concern here, even more so than in the states, where female prison populations are greater than ours.

The prison just south of Darwin was an interesting example of a limited number of women prisoners. They housed them outside the main cantonment, outside the main fence, in a smaller enclosure, in what looked like, and indeed may at one time have been, a motel. They put a large fence around this motel - type accommodation, and that seemed to serve the purpose very well for the number of people they had to accommodate there. Because they were adjacent to the main prison, they came under the same administration, but they had a separate manager and, even with a small number of prisoners, were able to develop programs especially for them. In this matter I think we learned something of interest to the minister and to those people who are going to be designing and running our prison.

I can only commend the report. I do not think I need to traverse the same ground as Mr Hargreaves did, but for my part the trip was well worth while. We were exposed to different opinions about all of the matters that we went to look at. This report is our interpretation of what was said to us by a large number of people from three different jurisdictions - from corrections officers and bureaucrats, with a little bit of levelling from politicians.

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