Page 2400 - Week 06 - Thursday, 23 June 2011
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MR SPEAKER: Yes, Chief Minister, if you could focus on the AMC.
MS GALLAGHER: Thank you, Mr Speaker. Part of implementing those recommendations from the Hamburger review and the task force that has been set up to do that will, we have no doubt, improve the systems in place at the Alexander Maconochie Centre. But I am not going to stand here and accept that there has been failure at the AMC. What we have—
Mr Seselja: Why did you need a review so quickly?
MS GALLAGHER: Well, the review—
Mr Seselja interjecting—
MR SESELJA: Thank you, Mr Seselja.
MS GALLAGHER: You forget so easily, Mr Seselja. The review that was commissioned was organised as part of the commencement of this facility—very up front. This was a new thing for the ACT to manage. We had not previously managed a jail before, and we were very clear that we would review the operations of that jail, and if that review found there were ways and measures to improve in terms of our systems and processes, we needed to act on that. And that is exactly what the Attorney-General and this government will do. This is not around apportioning blame or admitting failure. I know that is something that the opposition are obsessed with. This is about being open, being transparent, reviewing your services, reviewing your systems and, where there is opportunity to improve, you work hard to do that.
I think that we as a community should be very proud of the fact that we have brought prisoners home to the ACT. They are able to serve their sentence in the ACT. Our community is looking after members of the community who have been sentenced for a crime or are on remand, so that those people can be cared for in their community. That is something that we should be very proud of.
I accept that the opposition is very interested in the salacious nature of correctional settings and all the excitement that that brings. We accept that. But I think that when we look at the principles around why the AMC was established, the fact is that we implemented a review to check what we were doing and how we were faring. From there, if there are improvements to be made, Hamburger went to some very, very fine detail of improvements that he believed needed to be made at the jail, down to—(Time expired.)
MR SPEAKER: Mr Smyth, a supplementary question?
MR SMYTH: Yes, thank you, Mr Speaker. Chief Minister, who is responsible for the failures of governance at the AMC today?
MS GALLAGHER: Again, this is where we get stuck with the opposition—just stuck on the politics of negativity, of failure and of apportioning blame when the
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