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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (10 December) . . Page.. 4583 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

It is not just to do with a gaol being an awful gaol or a good gaol, although I am sure that has some role in it; it is to do with being separated from one's family. If you are in Goulburn Gaol and your spouse or children do not have access to a vehicle, it must be very difficult for them to visit you. It must be very difficult for a parent to take their children to visit somebody in an institution like Goulburn Gaol. Leaving Canberra just exacerbates all the problems that gaols create. That leads us into further debate about whether we have a gaol or not. That is something that Mr Humphries has tabled a discussion paper on.

Mr Speaker, I am very concerned about this solution. I think it should be a temporary solution. The Minister should report back to the Assembly, say, every six months on the numbers of people on remand, how many are detained in Canberra and how many have been moved out of Canberra. A commitment of that type would certainly make me much more comfortable about supporting legislation that I am particularly uncomfortable about.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (11.16), in reply: Mr Speaker, in closing this debate, I want to thank members for their contributions and make a few points about the way in which the legislation is intended to operate. Ms Tucker described the Bill as a short-term fix to a long-term problem. I would concede that that is essentially what the legislation is all about. I do not like having to arrange for inmates of our Remand Centre to be taken to places outside the ACT. I have commented repeatedly in this place about the inadequacy of the Remand Centre, as have other members, including Ms Follett. I think it is fairly well understood that the Remand Centre is rapidly reaching, if not long past, its use-by date and needs to be replaced with something far more appropriate to principles of contemporary incarceration leading into the twenty-first century.

That issue is a reasonably long-term project. I have indicated that I think that the ACT should try to aim to have its own correctional facility for full-time inmates by the turn of the century. I suggest that timetable because I do not think that it is appropriate for us to say, "We need a prison. Let us rush in and build one right now. We need a new remand centre. Let us rush in and build one right now". Given the factors we are dealing with, including increasing rates of incarceration and increasing rates of remand, we have to plan how we are going to deal with these issues into the distant future, not just for the next couple of years. We have to make appropriate plans and design a system which is going to meet those needs very well. I think that those who were responsible for building the Remand Centre back in the 1960s did not take those sorts of long-term considerations adequately into account.

Whatever the situation, Mr Speaker, we have the problem that we have too many people incarcerated in the Remand Centre and too few spaces for them to be kept there. We need to have a system for handling that overflow. I share the concerns that Ms Follett expressed, and I think Ms Tucker also expressed, that places like the city watch-house are not adequate alternatives to the Remand Centre. They are okay on a very short-term basis; but they do not have adequate exercise facilities, they do not have adequate recreational facilities for people incarcerated there, they do not have any capacity to provide education or work programs for the people on remand, and they do not have the capacity to provide proper catering to those on remand. Places like the watch-house are quite inadequate on a long-term basis.

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