Page 4355 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 22 September 2010
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We go back to the philosophical underpinnings, and it is an interesting dynamic that we are seeing where this Labor-Greens alliance is pulling this government. I do not think it took much pulling.
Mr Hanson: They’re naturally inclined that way.
MR SESELJA: We have a situation where the government are naturally inclined that way. They are naturally inclined to put the human rights of prisoners above the rights of prison guards. Mr Stanhope, in his contribution, noted concerns about truancy. Likewise with truancy, they have said that there is somehow now a human right to wag school. It is ridiculous, but that is what we are seeing. If you were to ask someone in the community about whether or not they would have thought that Jon Stanhope and his government would have been fiercely committed to keeping the prison drug free, I think we know the answer we would get. I think that this government have been looking for the excuse. This was always the end point. This was always where they were going to end up. They were always going to end up with this kind of harm-minimisation approach. But it is harm minimisation at whose expense?
It does not minimise the harm for prison guards; it puts them in harm’s way. That is what it does. Despite the fact that there may be well-intentioned people who argue for it, it is not in the best interests of prisoners either. To argue that a prisoner who enters the Alexander Maconochie Centre who is addicted to illicit drugs and who is seeking to be rehabilitated and seeking to get off the drugs is well served by a regime which is ineffective in stopping drugs from getting in and which allows, therefore, needles to be exchanged is absurd.
At 6.00 pm, in accordance with standing order 34, the debate was interrupted. The motion for the adjournment of the Assembly having been put and negatived, the debate was resumed.
MR SESELJA: It is absurd to argue that prisoners are well served by a regime which is lax on drugs getting into prison and which simply has as the solution a needle exchange program. The prisoners are not served by it; it does not aid their rehabilitation. To argue that the prisoners are not affected by there being more needles in prison and more drugs in prison is ridiculous. It raises safety issues for prisoners, not to mention the prison guards.
What this government is now choosing to do and what this Greens-Labor alliance is choosing to do is to effectively do what I think people would have suspected they always wanted to do with this prison—to have a lax approach in the first place, to put so-called human rights concerns above the rights of workers to a safe environment and the rights of prisoners seeking genuine rehabilitation to seek that in a drug-free environment. This government is selling out all of those interests.
The government are selling those interests out and saying, “We can’t do anything about drugs getting into prison.” They have not really tried, and, let us face it, that is at the nub of this. It is a philosophical position where they were never going to be fair
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