Page 919 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 29 March 2011
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already part of the induction package and that other courses and training were not available.
I am also concerned about the fact we have only just started providing some professional supervision for workers there. It is a pretty common practice across the community sector and, I would suggest, across areas like care and protection to provide professional supervision. I am pleased to see that it will happen, but, again, this should have been in place beforehand.
At the beginning of this year I met with a training provider who spoke about his optimism when this review took off late last year. There was a flurry of activity to get some vocational education and training providers into Bimberi for a bit of a roundtable about providing courses and training. He said this was a good move because previously it had been so frustrating. For months and months and months and months his organisation had been saying: “We can offer these voc ed and training programs for young people in there. They’ll be free. This is something we can offer and they would be good skills for the young people to develop.” Obstacle after obstacle after obstacle was put in their way. We saw a couple of media opportunities around a couple of construction courses that I think were for a day or so. That is all well and good, but we need ongoing opportunities for young people.
Mrs Dunne mentioned the metal workshop and the kitchen as examples. I have been to Bimberi a couple of times, and I think it is a terrible waste not to have had those workshops up and going. When I went on my tour I was shown the art rooms, and there was plenty of talk about the art rooms. It occurred to me later that a lot of that was around deflecting attention from the other workshops where staff had not been employed to ensure that young people had opportunities to take up other courses and opportunities.
I want to see a training program in place. I have put questions on notice. The answers are not due yet, but when I receive those answers, I expect to see a fully developed program of training and opportunity for young people that will be in place in Bimberi in the next six to 12 months. If that is not available then it will make me question whether there is real commitment not just to the literacy and numeracy programs but also to the voc ed and training programs. I will be clear with the minister that I expect to see those programs organised, and I will be following up on them.
What this situation has shown us is that we need to be ever vigilant. That is why we have official visitors to go into closed communities to check and to talk to those people who are incarcerated in those communities about any complaints or any issues they may have. We as an Assembly have a big responsibility to be ever vigilant about those closed communities, whether it be AMC or, in this case, Bimberi, to be following up, to be asking questions, to be ensuring that recommendations from these reviews, for instance, but also recommendations that will come out of the human rights commissioner’s audit and also the Children and Young People Commissioner’s review are put in place. We cannot just have a single check; this will be an ongoing checking process.
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