Page 1006 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 30 March 2011
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Leave granted.
MRS DUNNE: I present the following paper:
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Services—Team meeting 2 March 2011—Copy of minutes.
Mr Speaker, members, we are here today in something that might seem like groundhog day because the Canberra Liberals will not give up on the young people who are incarcerated at Bimberi Youth Detention Centre, their teachers or their carers. We are here today because of the unfolding evidence about how the current review has been corrupted. We are here today because the Canberra Liberals believe that we need to put an end to that corrupted process, that discredited process, and start again with a proper judicial inquiry. We are here today because there is mounting evidence that the whole system has been corrupted. We are here today because we are seeing yet again the evidence of the Labor culture of cover-up. You want to cover up, to hide the truth, to obliterate and to distract people from what is actually going on at Bimberi Youth Detention Centre.
We know that we have a failed system at Bimberi, and the Canberra Liberals have spoken about that at length. We spoke about it and asked questions consistently through 2010 that culminated in December with our moving for a judicial inquiry. And what we have seen—and it was amply repeated yesterday—is a minister out of control, a government who has lost control of the Bimberi Youth Detention Centre. We have a minister who, for months, denied that there was anything going on. She eventually went to Bimberi without the media. She usually went to Bimberi with the idea of having a media stunt; so she would go there and talk about gardening or she would go there and talk about the barista course that might have run once.
But in November she went without media but she went with the admission that she was going there to cover her backside. And we know what happened at that meeting. When the staff told her how bad it was, she covered her ears and said, “La, la, la, la, I don’t want to hear.”
Ms Burch: Nonsense.
MRS DUNNE: We will come back to that, minister, a little while later and we will see just how much nonsense that is.
Mr Hanson: You are calling people liars, Joy. Be careful.
MRS DUNNE: You are calling people liars. And what we are seeing here are continuing breaches of security, kids on the roof on a regular basis. We are supposed to have fixed that but, again yesterday, we saw admissions that it is not fixed.
We have seen assaults on staff by inmates, on inmates by staff, and we have seen the very serious injuries after an MSS security guard was beaten with an iron bar. We
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