Page 1417 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 6 April 2011
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Mrs Dunne: On a point of order, Mr Speaker—
MR SPEAKER: Yes, Mrs Dunne.
MR CORBELL: I withdraw the comment, Mr Speaker.
MR SPEAKER: Thank you.
MR CORBELL: If you look at the Hansard record from 10 February you will see that the government did not oppose the passage of the motion. The government disagreed with some elements of the wording of the motion. We voted against that, because there were some elements of it that we thought were factually wrong—and that is on the record—but the government did not vote against the motion. The motion, as amended, was agreed to without dissent. That is what is recorded in the Hansard. So let us be very clear about the facts, because those opposite are not.
Let us also be clear about the facts concerning the government’s willingness to conduct this inquiry, even before that motion. I draw members’ attention to the comments of my predecessor, the then minister, Mr Hargreaves, who was asked on 28 October 2009 by the Chair of the Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety, “Will there be a review?” That is, a review of the prison. Mr Hargreaves said, “There has to be. There has to be.” Mr Hargreaves went on to elaborate. He said, “There are a number of things that we want to review. We want to look at policies and procedures. We want to make sure that human rights compliance is up to scratch. We want to make sure that we have got appropriate accountability measures in place.”
It was not a matter of the government being dragged kicking and screaming to a review. The minister volunteered it as something that needed to occur back in 2009. Let us get those facts on the record, Mr Speaker. Let us get some other facts on the record as well. Mr Hanson’s motion is strong on rhetoric but very poor when it comes to the facts. Let us deal with some of these other facts and let us see what Mr Hamburger, the independent reviewer, has concluded about the operations of the prison.
I for one do not for a moment assert that Mr Hamburger has given our prison a complete clean bill of health, because he has not. I would not walk away from that. The administration of a correctional facility is a complex and difficult task. It is the case, particularly when you are dealing with that environment, that not everything will work as you hope or anticipate that it will, especially in the immediate period following the commission of a new correctional environment.
What did Mr Hamburger conclude about how we fared during that post-commissioning period compared to the post-commissioning period of six other major prisons in Australia over the last decade? What he concluded, Mr Speaker, was this: the AMC compared very favourably with other prisons in terms of serious incidents during the post-commissioning period. Because of good planning, because of good management and because of the mechanisms and the processes that we had put in place, we had no adverse incidents in terms of unnatural deaths in custody, in
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