Page 3111 - Week 07 - Thursday, 1 July 2010
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the prison was opened, the general public has lost its confidence in this government’s ability to manage this portfolio.
This is described as teething problems by the minister. He has tried to say that these are teething problems. Of course we would expect a number of problems to occur. But it has been over a year now since the prisoners arrived and I think the ongoing problems that we have seen have certainly gone beyond simple teething problems. The JACS report obviously went into a great deal of detail about what went wrong and, if I get time at the end of my prescribed 20 minutes, I will come back to some of the recommendations. But a number of them were quite damning and a number of them were directly aimed at the minister.
The minister has denied the results of the committee. He has argued against the results of the JACS committee and has attacked the members of the JACS committee. I think it should be noted in this place that there was a government member on that committee, that Mary Porter was on that committee and that the committee’s findings were unanimous. So when he said that it was a politically motivated report and he attacked the findings and attacked the members, he attacked a member of his own party. I think it needs to be noted just how disingenuous Simon Corbell’s response has been.
In terms of things that have gone wrong—and there have been a number—probably the most substantive issue is the fact that we now have prisoners of different categories, particularly remandees and sentenced prisoners, being put in the same locale. Common sense would tell you that if you were managing a prison you would not put sentenced criminals next to remandees. You would not have a situation where they are put in the same place. And that is exactly what has happened. As a result of that, the number of assaults that we have seen on protected prisoners—and I have the numbers that came out of a question on notice—is significant. So we know what is happening is that the protected prisoners in the Alexander Maconochie Centre, in many cases remandees, are being assaulted by sentenced prisoners.
I do not think that the rhetoric about this being a human rights complaint prison is actually coming to fruition. How this government can possibly claim that they have addressed the human rights issues when they are putting remandees with sentenced prisoners and those remandees are being assaulted—and in one case, allegedly, a sexual assault; there may be others—by sentenced prisoners I think beggars belief and ridicules this government’s claims that it is a human rights compliant prison.
In fact, the alleged sexual assault led to a judge warning that if remandees cannot be kept in a safe environment he was going to have difficulty in sentencing or that it could cause problems with him and maybe other justices in sentencing prisoners. He made that as a warning to the community.
But it is quite clear that human rights is an issue that this government harps on when they need it. We saw that with Mr Stanhope and his use of the human rights commissioner yesterday in the debate, and then the way they scurry away from her and what she is saying when it is evidence or information that does not suit them, and the under-funding of the human rights commission, which I will get to in due course.
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