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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 11 Hansard (21 October) . . Page.. 3485 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

So far, we have seen from this Government prison workshops on strategies for reducing self-harm in custody, prison industries and corrections health. I congratulate the Government for doing those things. However, it would have been nice to see those things conducted in the context of a total package.

The Government has commissioned research of the literature. The research should have been conducted more than two years before a committee was actually given the task of doing it. The Government has said that it intends to commission research on rehabilitation and prisoners with special needs. Again, the comment I make is that it should have been done by now. As Mr Osborne has said, we have recommended that the Government appoint a project director to pull together all the program definitions, program evaluations, targets, costings and resource implications and call for expressions of interest in order that the difference between public and private sector program delivery can be compared and we can get on with the project. I wanted to reinforce the call for that to happen because I think that we have just gone dead in the water about this sort of thing and insufficient progress is being made.

Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, as you well know, we have gone around the country like a troupe of travelling players and we have seen all manner of gaols. We have seen the really good example at Mount Gambier in South Australia. I would like to acknowledge the presence in the gallery of Mr Roger Holding, the general manager of that institution. That facility is for people with medium and low classifications. A quick scan of the classifications of the people we have in prison in New South Wales at the moment will show that we have real problems. We have a problem with economies of scale as we have, say, only 130 people there, plus another 40 or 50 people on remand, and a 300-bed facility, yet we have to take care of the different types of people in it. It will be a real challenge.

As Mr Osborne has indicated, currently we have 118 men and seven women in New South Wales prisons. In fact, providing a facility for only that number of people is going to be a difficult challenge. We have 15 people being held in maximum security, 24 in medium security and 86 in low security, but we also have 17 being held in prison farms. We have not addressed how to approach the sentencing of people to prison farms. That is not in the report, but I raise the issue now for the Government to give some thought to it. Frankly, I do not have a solution, unless the Government builds a prison at Symonston and buys Callum Brae and - blam! - it has got itself a prison farm. Apart from that, I do not offer any suggestions.

I note from a response to a question on notice I asked of the Minister for Justice and Community Safety that, even though the report says that the average length of sentence is eight years, there is generally a quite low level of sentencing in the sense that 76.8 per cent of the prisoners are serving two years or less. That will have a direct impact on the manner of the programs that you provide for these people, the types of programs, the success rates and the length of time that you have to devote to these people. Talking about those programs, it is going to be a very interesting prison. I concur with Mr Humphries in hoping that we will have the best one in the world, as it happens, with best practice.

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