Page 1009 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 31 March 1993
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The point about the Remand Centre is that our first response will be legislative, to enhance non-custodial sentences and to look at transitional programs - a legislative response before the bricks and mortar response. The bricks and mortar response addresses two issues - the Remand Centre and the possibility of a long-term custodial facility. The Remand Centre certainly is a problem. It is, as was outlined in the report, a building built to a philosophy of the 1970s - a philosophy that has been abandoned in other States. The staff out there do work in difficult conditions, and we acknowledge that.
It is perhaps worth noting, though, that there have been some reforms in the Belconnen Remand Centre which have put it in the forefront of custodial facilities in the country. That relates to the fact that for some months we have had condoms on issue for prisoners as part of our initiative against HIV. In fact this Friday I will be going there to present some certificates to Remand Centre officers who have completed the second course on HIV and AIDS. We have had training courses for our Remand Centre officers. We then introduced training courses for the remandees. We introduced condoms. We are continuing those training programs. We are getting a lot of interest from interstate in how that program is going. I am pleased to report that it is going well, with no adverse effect on discipline.
While we are cleaning up this long-term problem of the Remand Centre, we have also been focusing on juvenile justice. We noted in the report that we will not be amalgamating adult and juvenile justice because we think it is important that juvenile justice remain as a children's services welfare focus rather than be in the adult corrective system, to avoid the risk of persons having the perception that one graduates from primary school to high school, as it were, in the one system. We want to keep juvenile justice as a welfare focus.
We had major problems again with run down infrastructure there, and a situation where the only way a juvenile could be sentenced to any term of imprisonment was to send him or her to New South Wales. This Assembly, in the last couple of years, has amended the Children's Services Act to allow juveniles to serve a term of imprisonment within the ACT, so the Quamby facility now covers both remandees and persons serving periods of detention. The Government announced in last year's budget a significant sum of money for a substantial refurbishment of the Quamby juvenile justice centre. So again we have addressed, at the juvenile end of the corrections program, first a legislative response to ensure that our young people can serve out terms of detention in the ACT, thus as far as possible preserving family links, and we have a bricks and mortar response to upgrade Quamby.
To answer Ms Szuty's question about timetables, work is going on within the department, on the feasibility of a replacement for the Belconnen Remand Centre, and that will come forward in due course in the budgetary process. There will be some identification in the forward capital works program of where we are intending to spend that money, and I would anticipate that there would be some community debate, and debate in this place, about what we do.
The vexed long-term problem of the gaol for Canberra is one which the Government has responded to with some degree of caution, although acknowledging that it is a legitimate issue. Mr Humphries raised the point of the private prison. That is something that the Government has not totally closed the door on, but I note that private prisons which have been successful in Australia - there is no doubt that they have been successful - operate as a balance to a
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