Page 4295 - Week 14 - Thursday, 24 October 1991
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On the other hand, I can share his frustration. We are not talking about innocent little babes leaving court; sometimes they are tough, young adults almost. They are tattooed, they are muscle bound and they are "toughies", and they are laughing at our inability to do much about them in these fine default situations. They do laugh at us; but, all the same, I believe that we need to take steps to get the laugh off their faces by giving them useful work to do, useful community service projects.
I remember when there was a trial run to get the youngsters at Quamby down to the Molonglo Gorge to plant trees. They did not like it at first and there were a few slackers, but after a while they found that it is good to get out and to do that sort of work. I think they planted a few thousand trees. I do not know whether they grew - - -
Mr Stefaniak: I am happy to see them doing it and trying.
MR COLLAERY: Nevertheless, I am sure Mr Stefaniak would have been happy to see them there with pickaxes, digging into that solid, hard, rocky, flinty soil. I can just see Corporal Schultz there, cracking the whip. That is an amiable term, Mr Speaker.
Mr Connolly: Did they chain them together like a convict gang?
MR COLLAERY: Yes; one can hear the whip cracking through Molonglo Gorge as we break rocks again. I read yesterday, in preparing a speech for the wills debate, that the last flogging occurred in Canberra in 1874. I regret to say that Mr Stefaniak would be disappointed to know that it is so far distant, and the prospect of it being repeated is even more distant, I would suggest, whilst the numbers in this house remain the way they are.
Frankly, we have dealt in good humour with this, and I intend to continue dealing with it. It is a sort of horrendous proposition - I say through you, Mr Speaker, to Mr Stefaniak - simply because Quamby is an expensive problem as it is for our officials. We have big shifts there of more than 30 staff over the 24-hour period and, of course, four or five or six incarcerees from time to time. That is a heavy expense and I thought at one stage that we might be able to move away from that to bail hostels and the like; but there are some tough cases that do not lend themselves to the bail hostel parenting arrangement that non-government agencies can do, and we were planning to build a 12-bed unit at Weston. Architectural plans and all sorts of things are there. The Minister can explain where we are at with that.
Be that as it may, we have to maintain the declension between punishment and reformation. There is still some chance, although Mr Stefaniak and I will probably agree that in some cases there is not; you can predict it when you see it over the years. But if they are under 18 I
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