Page 1666 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 13 May 2015
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way, and history is repeating. Mr Rattenbury’s amendment to the amendment seeks information, so it appears Mr Rattenbury is again going to support the government down this path. That does not surprise me; I am not shocked that that is the case. We will not oppose the amendment to the amendment, but we will oppose Mr Corbell’s amendment because essentially it is a denial. He is saying it was always going to be 140 beds, with these fictional other beds.
Let me be very clear: Mr Rattenbury talked in his speech about the jail and the fact that it is now at about 374 beds, and this is where history repeats. About a decade ago Mr Stanhope said, in a ministerial statement to the Legislative Assembly:
The Alexander Maconochie Centre will include a new 139-bed remand centre to replace the Belconnen Remand Centre and the Symonston Temporary Remand Centre. It will include a 175-bed facility for sentenced prisoners and a 60-bed transitional release centre for low-risk prisoners in the final stages of their sentences.
That is 374 beds. At that stage that was not speculative; that was not just a number plucked out of the air by Mr Stanhope. We know that because of FOI, and I have information from questions on notice and so on. That figure of 374 was based on analysis. It was done by the Treasury, based on projected prisoner numbers. As we have seen for the University of Canberra hospital, that was based on a prudent number to plan for not just the day it opened but the short to medium term. What Mr Rattenbury is telling us is that the prison now, in 2015, has about 374 spaces, so Mr Stanhope was right when he made the original announcement. We need to build for the future. We need to build the capacity to meet demand in the short and medium term. Although that 374 figure from the advice was pretty much spot on, you never quite know where it is going to go. As with increases in health, there has been an increase in the number of sentenced prisoners. We never can quite anticipate what demand will be, so it is foolish in the extreme to then undercut. What history tells us in health and in prisons is projections are often overly conservative.
What then happened is those bed numbers were cut. There was analysis, there was advice and the government said, “We’re going to do what the experts tell us.” They then cut it for cost saving measures because they were blowing their budget. It had blown from $110 million to $130 million, and they cut it. Mr Corbell came to this place, in his Orwellian fashion, to say everything will be fine. He said:
The government chose to reduce the scale of the project—
they chose to—
and in doing so ensured that the budgeted amount would still deliver a functional, world-class prison facility that will meet the needs of our prisoner population well into the future.
He said 300 beds would serve the prisoner population well into the future, but Mr Rattenbury has just said no, it did not. We are now at 374. Mr Corbell was in this place, saying to the Assembly that the prison would have capacity at 300 to meet the needs of our prisoner population well into the future. We are now well into the future.
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