Page 1006 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 31 March 1993
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MR HUMPHRIES: He is going to visit them. I am sure that he will find it a very illuminating experience. We have had in the last few weeks a privately run institution opened at Junee in New South Wales. That provides for a relatively cost-effective way of dealing with our prisoners. I think, Madam Speaker, that there are real alternatives available to the Government which would see this happen without enormous expense to the Territory budget, but we must first of all develop the will to deal with the problem.
MS SZUTY (4.09): Madam Speaker, the problems with the retention of people in custody are vexed and complex. We have the situation where any expenditure on facilities for inmates is opposed by many in the community. There are many who feel, although they would not express it in such terms, that those who are found guilty of crimes against people and property should suffer not only exclusion from society but also physical deprivation. But in Canberra we have a custodial facility where the majority of the inmates are not sentenced to custodial detention. Only 17.5 per cent of all ACT detainees received custodial sentences in 1988-89. There is nothing to suggest that this has changed significantly in the intervening period. Therefore, in the ACT we have the situation where the majority of inmates at the Belconnen Remand Centre will be released, yet the conditions within the Remand Centre have been allowed to deteriorate. I acknowledge that the ACT Government is trying to improve the situation with scarce resources. The ACT community is, in general, more concerned about education, health and other issues than the state of Canberra's remand facility.
However, I welcome this report and the Government's response, which, on the whole, is positive. What I ask that the Minister further outline is: When will the proposed feasibility studies be carried out, what are their terms of reference, and what timeframe are we giving for these tasks? In 1984 there was a need identified for a new remand facility. The current Belconnen Remand Centre superintendent, Mr Keith Brightman, in his submission to the ACT Corrections Review Committee, stated:
A new Remand Centre is desperately needed for the ACT ... The centre is small, inhumane, provides poor working conditions for staff and is structurally incapable of any up-to-date custodial corrections programs. Due to its size, staff and running costs per detainee are much higher than in other States.
Nine years after the problem was identified in the report by Mr Tony Vinson and others we are still yet to carry out feasibility studies. There are no votes in improved remand facilities, as Mr Humphries has suggested. No-one gets bouquets for improving the living conditions of people charged before the courts, even though as Australians we accept the premise that a person is innocent until proven guilty. I lay most of the blame for the current lack of change on the Federal Government which chose to allow a number of ACT assets to run down in the years preceding self-government. I also lay some of the blame on the governments of the First Assembly, although I recognise that this report is in part a product of the workings of that Assembly. However, the Ministers involved would only have had to ask their superintendent about conditions there to begin the work on feasibility studies.
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