Page 4351 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 27 November 2013
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
(f) that the ACT Government allocated design funding for the expansion of the AMC in the 2013-2014 Budget; and
(g) the recent roundtable the Minister for Corrections held with representatives of the criminal justice system to better understand the significant and unexpected increase in detainees.
(2) Commends the exceptional professionalism and commitment of the ACT Corrective Services in responding to these increased pressures.
(3) Calls on the Minister for Corrections to keep the Assembly informed regarding developments at the AMC.”.
I have circulated the amendment because certainly Mr Hanson has taken a rather historical approach to his motion. He has sought to prosecute something that has been prosecuted on a number of occasions here. And my amendment really seeks to focus on some of the current situation.
Let me speak to that. I think what is true—Mr Hanson has spoken about this in his motion—is that the Alexander Maconochie Centre was built with a capacity of 300 when it opened in 2009. I think that is known and understood. What really goes to the heart of, I think, the points that Mr Hanson is seeking to make in this motion and has just prosecuted in his speech is really the question of what capacity should it have been built to. I think it is fair to observe—and I will put the caveat on this that I was not in these discussions, but having looked at it now that I have become the minister I draw some conclusions—that the government had before it a number of scenarios, a number of projections on what prisoner populations would be over a time series. I think members have those. I have certainly provided them in answer to a question on notice by Mr Smyth. Members can readily look through those, see which companies provided them and the various projections that they made.
What one can see from looking at that is that there was a wide variety of scenarios from which the government was required to choose—scenarios from a range of criminal consultants and from Treasury ACT. What I think that shows is that prisoner population forecasting is a very difficult task. It is one for which there is no easy pathway and one in which clearly people have strong, different views about what the actual answer might be.
The government had before it a number of scenarios, and I think hindsight now shows that the Treasury forecast did not match what has actually happened. It is simple fact. No-one can deny it. The Treasury numbers are there, and the prison population has been greater than that. I think that needs to be acknowledged. History shows it. It is certainly easy, in hindsight—and we can all sit here and say it—to say that is now the case. Treasury officials at the time, I am sure, based their scenario on what they thought was the right outcome. And clearly that was not the case.
But what is true is that the government had to choose one of those scenarios, and they chose one. What has happened since then is the prisoner numbers have been higher than the scenario that they chose. Others may choose to comment on that, but I think
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video