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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 13 Hansard (4 December) . . Page.. 4403 ..

MS FOLLETT (3.33): Mr Speaker, I welcome Mr Humphries's production of this discussion paper and I congratulate the officers who have been involved in preparing it, particularly Mr Fitzgerald. I think it is a valuable contribution to what must be a very necessary and very timely debate in the ACT on the future of our corrections system.

Mr Speaker, I want to make a few comments on the matter whilst it is still current. The first thing I want to say is that I do not believe that there has been so much a change in the Labor Party's policy but rather perhaps a shift in emphasis. Previously, up until, say, earlier this year, the party's written policy was that an ACT Labor government would not construct a prison within its first five years of government. We have had five years of Labor government and we did not construct a prison. I consider that that policy has been fully satisfied and it is time to adopt another one. The matter has been under considerable debate and discussion within a policy committee of the ACT branch of the party. It is a fact that that policy committee has now adopted a position that does envisage the establishment of an ACT prison, and it is that policy committee's intention to recommend that to the party's policy-making forum at conference. So there has been a development of our policy. It is not exactly a reversal, but rather a development.

Mr Speaker, I think that a discussion about a prison is particularly timely as well from another point of view, and that is that in the course of government since 1989 there have been a number of steps taken on the capital works side in our corrections facilities in the ACT. We have, for instance, established the Winchester Centre, the new police headquarters in the ACT, at some considerable cost. We have also built a new Magistrates Court, again at a cost of many millions of dollars. It is perhaps unfortunate that we have come last of all to the very people who are at the sharp end of our judicial and corrections system, namely, the detainees. I think it is time we got around to them, Mr Speaker, and I completely support Mr Humphries's comments about the need to replace the Belconnen Remand Centre. That centre has been studied and inspected and reviewed for at least a decade, if not more, and it has been found to be totally inadequate. It is high time that that noted and accepted inadequacy was translated into a capital works program that actually did something about it. We have been applying bandaid solutions for some years now. We mentioned during the course of the debate on this year's budget that yet another bandaid was to be applied, at a cost of some half a million dollars or so, and that would not solve the problem. Mr Humphries knows that. I know that. The problem will be solved when we replace the facility.

There are a couple of other matters that I want to address whilst we are talking about prisons. The first of those is that a corrections service is far more than bricks and mortar. I believe that it is our obsession with bricks and mortar in the form of prisons and remand centres that has very much constrained the whole debate on how best we can manage the care and rehabilitation of offenders. We have been as obsessed with bricks and mortar in the corrections area as we have been in the hospitals area, the health area, the education system, and so on. This is wrong.

Mr Speaker, rather, in my opinion, we should regard our prison population as a community of people, perhaps a microcosm of our society; a microcosm that consists not just of the offenders themselves but also of their families and their friends, and, equally importantly, of the managers, the administrators, the supervisors and the staff who look after those offenders. That is a very important community of people.

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