Page 3068 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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The point is that, when you add all those facts together, as I said the other day in this place, what it tells you is that when they said this had the capacity for the number of prisoners we have got for the next 25 years, they had enough information at that point to know that that was not true. They clearly had sufficient information, if you add all of those up, to see it is not true.
What we know from this budget is that we are going to pay the price for that decision that was made a number of years ago. We are going to pay the price in terms of new facilities at the jail. We just await the bill. Meanwhile, we have seen that the minister has not delivered on a number of aspects of the jail that were promised, including a gymnasium and a chapel and choir place. That is an issue that has been discussed in some detail.
But the cost of the prison keeps growing. We have seen the money to fix up the problems outlined in the Hamburger report and other areas, and the cost of the prison now in terms of capital seems to be approaching $140 million. Madam Assistant Speaker, if you were to look at the opportunity cost of that $140 million, you are talking about, just in interest—money that could be used elsewhere—about $10 million a year, or close to it.
You need to add that to the cost of prisoners. You need to realise that when we sent prisoners to New South Wales there were not those other costs. That was $263 a day. But you have to add to that cost of $422 that it now costs us the opportunity cost of about $10 million, which would blow out the cost of a prisoner per day to close to $550 a day. That is an extraordinary amount of money. It is way more than in any other jurisdiction. It is way more than was promised. In fact, when Mr Stanhope brought about this project, I think it was in 2006, he said that it would cost us no more than the amount for sending prisoners to New South Wales. But what we know now is that it costs us twice the money.
The question is: are we getting value for money? I think that we all understand here that we have a responsibility to look after the people that we incarcerate. We have a duty to them and to the community to do as much as we can to make sure that they are rehabilitated, so that they do not reoffend. But when you look at the results from the Hamburger report and the results from the Burnet inquiry, I think it is quite clear that we are not getting value for money.
There was the claim that this was going to be a prison that was different from all other prisons and that it was going to be human rights compliant. When you look at some of the problems that this jail is plagued by, there are comparisons made with New South Wales, where they are not getting access to the through-care, to the counselling, to the educational programs and the recreational programs; prisoners say that they are bored. I think it was Mr Corbell who said that part of the program of this jail was to give them a busy time, to keep them occupied. That is certainly not happening, particularly with the number of lockdowns they have had. So it is quite clear that we are not getting the value for money that we wanted and we are not doing the service that we could for our prisoners.
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