Page 3090 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 24 September 2014
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I do not have time to go through the many things that ACT Corrective Services do to promote a healthy prison, but I will touch on a few of them because I think it is important to again bring facts to today’s discussion.
ACT Corrective Services, in collaboration with ACT Health and our community sector partners, provide a broad range of programs with the aim of reducing drug consumption, addiction and the associated harms. There are a number of programs available to detainees at the AMC to assist with their rehabilitation from alcohol and other drug use and abuse, including Solaris, the therapeutic community, the self-management and recovery training, or SMART, program run in partnership with Directions ACT, and through offering support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.
We support community agencies to enter the jail and provide education and training to detainees on safe practices and health promotions activities designed to reduce BBV and STD transmission. We provide bleach and condoms to detainees, and have rigorous policies and procedures to manage blood and bodily fluid spills.
So for the Canberra Liberals to say that the ACT government has failed to investigate other options, as they suggest in the motion today, for reducing the transmission of blood-borne viruses at the AMC is simply not fact. It is nothing more than an ill-informed and uneducated personal opinion.
As members are aware, there is drug use occurring in every jail in the country, if not in the world. While all efforts are made to deter and stop contraband entering the prison environment, it does happen. I have acknowledged this openly. I have also provided significant information to members in this place about the strategies that are in place to prevent contraband from entering the prison. Both Mr Hanson and Mr Wall have no doubt had those strategies explained to them on the visits they have made to the AMC.
I should be very clear again in this place that I remain committed to the three-pronged strategy I referred to earlier: supply reduction, demand reduction and harm minimisation.
We know that, unfortunately, many of the detainees do have criminal records that are in part directly related to drug and alcohol abuse. The Chief Minister spoke of the issues that face many of our detainees at the AMC. Those are again the facts of the situation.
We know that the primary vector for blood-borne virus transmission in this community is from unsafe injecting practice. And we know—the health sector, the epidemiologists, the federal government—that everyone in fact agrees that the best way to stop blood-borne virus transmission in people who continue to engage in unsafe injecting practices is to provide them with clean equipment. That is what we do in the general community and I do not see why those at the AMC deserve some lesser level of access to health care.
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