Page 3092 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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Mr Hargreaves: It could be half empty.
MR HANSON: I am a glass half full man myself, and I appreciate that this is very much a glass half empty government. But what I have been calling for for some time is for the minister to actually pick up the phone, have a conversation with his counterpart in New South Wales and say, “Can we start to look at bringing your prisoners to the AMC?” There are a lot of very good reasons for that in terms of rehabilitation and the closeness to families and the money that we could save. The reason it is costing us so much per capita, per head, for our prisoners is that the AMC is half full—or half empty, whichever way you want to look at it. In explanation of this—this is a good quote—Minister Hargreaves said:
I don’t think we should be doing anything about increasing the numbers until we are 100 per cent confident they’ll receive excellent service.
I’m 100 per cent confident our people will be receiving that service and then I want to make sure I can say that same thing in 12 months time.
I do not know what that means. Is the jail good to go or is it not good to go? Have we got prisoners in there and it is a good jail that has got all the problems fixed or is it not? I do not know. Maybe the minister, in response, can tell us quite where we are at with that jail. We know that we have had recent reports of drug paraphernalia, razor blades, drug tests and so on, and the minister can talk to that. I am very disappointed to hear that; I really am.
Regardless of the criticism that I have had about the process of the Alexander Maconochie Centre, we all wanted to see it work as best as it could and we were hoping that we would not see these sorts of incidents. It is a terrible shame and I would like to hear from the minister exactly what is going on out there at the Alexander Maconochie Centre and what is being done to make sure that we do not have the same problems that we had at the Belconnen Remand Centre with relation to drugs, razor blades, violence and so on.
The Alexander Maconochie Centre itself, in terms of the overruns, has been a project that has been plagued by problems. We know that the prison still has a number of security defects. We know that there are still elements to the security program that are to be delivered, in particular the RFID. We know that the prison had a number of teething problems, as they are being called by the minister, in terms of heating, food allocations and so on. So this has not been a portfolio without its fair share of problems; let us hope the minister can explain it to us in his time allotted.
I would like to note that it was somewhat unfortunate at the estimates hearings, the debate that ensued. I am prepared to take my fair share of responsibility, as I hope the minister will, but what I call on you to do in your allotted time is just to explain to us where we are at with the current state of the Alexander Maconochie Centre, where we are at in terms of the drugs and other paraphernalia that have been found and where we can go going forward. And could you please respond to where we are at with the New South Wales prisoner issue? It is a lot of money that we can save and I would have thought that, if the jail has 160 of our prisoners in it and it is good enough for our prisoners, it should be good enough for those from New South Wales.
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