Page 573 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 9 March 2011
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about the ACT Corrective Services website? Go and have a look. It is still live and it says:
Presently the capacity of the AMC is 300.
Presently: is that true? Is that true, minister? Is it currently, presently, that the capacity of the AMC is 300, or is it 245 as you said in November?
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Mr Hargreaves): Mr Hanson, direct your remarks through the chair, please?
MR HANSON: Certainly, Mr Assistant Speaker. A dictionary definition of “capacity” is the maximum amount that can he held or taken in. That is a very simple definition—and the maximum capacity is 245. It is not 300 as we were repeatedly told by Simon Corbell. He is trying to use this language now of “operational capacity”. But that was not in any of the speeches or any of the statements. By “operational capacity”, actually what they mean is “full”. Actually, what they mean is open. So by operational capacity they mean actually prisoners in it. This is like Yes, Minister: you have only got a capacity for 300 if it is empty; as soon as you actually put prisoners in there it no longer has a capacity for 300; it has only got a capacity for 245. It is like the hospital with no patients from Yes, Minister; that is exactly what it is.
So what is his motive? Why did he lie to us? I will tell you why—because it was Simon Corbell who reduced the capacity of the jail that was promised by Stanhope from 374 down to 300, and at the time when he did that, in 2007, he said:
The government chose to reduce the scale of the project, and in doing so ensured that the budgeted amount would still deliver a functional, world-class prison facility that will meet the needs of our prisoner population well into the future. Yes, it is less than was originally anticipated, but it still provides us with significant capacity into the future. The advice I have is that it gives us that capacity—certainly for the next 20 to 25 years.
The projected planning for the prison in terms of population gives us real capacity to accommodate growth into the future and certainly gives us a facility in terms of its current bedding configuration, as currently being constructed—not its potential but its current bedding configuration—to meet our needs over the next 25 years or so.
Well, Mr Corbell was wrong when he said that. He said that it did not matter that he had reduced the scale of this from 374 to 300 because it could still meet demand for the next 25 years based on the current bedding configuration. But that is not true, is it, because we are fitting bunk beds into the place? After two years of it being opened, we are fitting bunk beds into the place—changing the bedding configuration after two years, not for at least 25 years as he promised in 2007.
Let me go now to the smoking gun because of Mr Corbell’s own figures at the time. This was provided to the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Seselja, as shadow minister for corrections at the time. A question on notice in August 2007 states that in 2008 there were expected to be 244 prisoners and in 2009 there were expected to be 247 prisoners; those were the prisoner projections. So Mr Corbell at the time knew that the
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