Page 1398 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2006
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the size of the population that we are looking after is only going to cost an extra $7 million? I am sorry, but I do not believe it; it does not make sense.
Then there is the actual cost, the financial cost. Should we borrow, for instance, to build the prison? No, apparently we are going to pay for it because all the money is in the budget; all the money is in the appropriation, according to the Treasurer. So there is a cost and we have not heard from the government how they are going to pay the recurrent costs, how that affects the budget bottom line.
When we put forward the concept of the prison, and as we worked towards it in 2000-01, all of our studies were predicated on probably half of the prison being used by New South Wales, because in the late 1990s, early 2000s, New South Wales had a problem. Their prisons were full. There was no excess capacity; indeed, they were looking for extra space. But, because this government has taken so much time, delaying this, and has not been able to make a decision, New South Wales have reopened a number of shut prisons—the closest, of course, is Cooma—and built new prisons. So my understanding is that the New South Wales system now has adequate, if not excess, capacity and it has absolutely no intention of sending prisoners to the ACT. So there is no financial support there. Every cent to run this prison will be coming out of the taxpayers’ pockets—and we know the state of the budget.
You can tell the level of discomfort this week and last week among those on the government benches: there have been a whole lot of personal attacks. There are no answers on what they are doing, because you can smell the decay in the financial position of the Jon Stanhope led ACT budget.
The problem for us is that we have to pay for the prison. You cannot run it at half full. You cannot half-secure it. The number one cost is staff and security. You have got to pay for the lot. So the big problems that we face now are a blowing capital cost, and unspecified, uncertain, but I suspect blowing out, recurrent costs.
Let us look at the numbers. About 100 to 120 prisoners—it varies somewhat—go interstate. There are about 70 in the remand centre. So the ACT has probably got 180 prisoners that might have to be housed here. Let us assume that the judiciary will sentence a few more, because the judiciary for some time have been saying that they would not send prisoners to New South Wales. So make it 220, add another 30 on top and make it 250. It is not going to be a full prison, but we have to run it as a full prison. All our numbers were predicated on support from New South Wales—support that is not there, support that this government will have to make up because they have taken so long and not done the job properly.
That is why we say that at this stage, at this time when things are so tight, when we cannot get the waiting lists in the hospital under control, when we do not have an adequate number of police on the streets, when this government does not put an adequate provision in the budget for the management of assets, when the road program has just dissolved into a black hole called Simon Corbell’s Gungahlin Drive Extension—and now he is building half the road for three times the money—
Mrs Dunne: On time and on budget.
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