Page 5903 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 8 December 2010

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Unless we curb it, unless we do everything which is in our power to stop this, I am extremely concerned that something more serious than what has already happened at
Bimberi could well take place in the near future. How do we expect to retain quality staff in the public service and retain quality staff at Bimberi if we have this kind of culture and these kinds of threats and pressures in the workplace?

Just last week, I saw in the paper an advertisement for a position at Bimberi. I think it was a youth worker position. I am pretty sure it paid $48,000 to $52,000 a year. That is a reasonable income, in anyone’s language. There are a lot of people in Canberra who are earning $48,000 to $52,000 a year, a lot of people in the public service who are earning about $50,000 a year. But how many people are earning $50,000 a year under the physical threat of violence and with the cultural problems which are taking place at Bimberi?

The staff at Bimberi really do earn their money. They do their roles because of a sense of duty and with a tremendous commitment to the territory and to the future of the territory by supporting young people that obviously do have problems. They obviously have come from troubled circumstances and obviously do need support. But how can we possibly support the young people at Bimberi when we have a toxic culture there which is causing so many problems at so many different levels?

I urge the crossbench and I urge the government to take this situation very seriously and support Mrs Dunne’s motion to ensure that we do everything we can to try to get an adequate solution to what is a very real problem. There is evidence mounting about just how serious the situation is. Yet it seems to me that there is concern that this Assembly may not pass this motion today. It is absolutely vital we do everything we can and I urge all in this place to support Mrs Dunne’s motion.

MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Minister for Transport, Minister for Territory and Municipal Services, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Land and Property Services, Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs and Minister for the Arts and Heritage) (10.53): The government will not be supporting Mrs Dunne’s motion to establish a board of inquiry into the operations of Bimberi youth detention centre. I will come to the reasons for that in a moment but we do need, first, to remind ourselves how it was that Bimberi came about.

A human rights audit at the old Quamby Youth Detention Centre by the ACT human rights commissioner identified a number of areas of improvement in the administration of youth justice in the ACT. Quamby was an ageing facility, designed for a different age, when different philosophies around youth detention pertained. It needed to be replaced by a modern centre, adequately equipped to meet the needs of some of the most excluded, the most vulnerable and the most complex and highest risk young people in our community. What better way to do this than to build the nation’s first human rights compliant youth detention centre? Bimberi was designed and built and it operates under human rights legislation.

No-one ever said success would come easily. Operating a justice system on the premise that every participant in that system has basic human rights adds a layer of complexity to everything from the physical design of a place to the culture that


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