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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 11 Hansard (21 October) . . Page.. 3487 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

The Government has projected a cost of $35m and a saving of $4.5m over 20 years - the massive amount of $225,000 a year or the cost of two judges, which is not much in my view. But there is no proof for that. How they dreamed up this magic figure of $4.5m in savings is absolutely beyond me. There is information in the Age figures that should have been provided to the committee but was not. I am very tempted to suggest that it has been deliberately withheld, but I will try to control myself.

The Government talks of the ongoing recurrent costs. I suppose that is where the magic $4.5m of savings will come from. Let us look at a couple of examples. At Port Phillip prison the annual accommodation fee is $8m, the annual corrections fee is $14.2m, the annual performance fee is $1.6m, the start-up fee is $4.3m and the local council concessions are $2.4m. That is a heck of a lot of money, even though it is a 600-bed, male only, principally maximum security prison.

The Deer Park prison for women has 150 people in it, but there is the same story again. The annual accommodation is $2.9m, the annual corrections fee is $5.2m, and the annual performance fee is $700,000. They are significant figures in anybody's money. If this Government can portray a saving of $4.5m, it ought not to insult this standing committee by suggesting that it does not know the figures. I might ask my office to subscribe further to the Melbourne Age and share it with the committee so that we can find out how much it costs because, clearly, they have better sources of investigation than this Government. I have to express severe disappointment with that.

I commend the report to the Assembly for the detail with which it attacks how we should be looking at some of the programs in it and how we should be avoiding deaths in custody. Only recently a young Aboriginal detainee at the Belconnen Remand Centre was in the process of inflicting harm on himself and he was prevented from doing so when officers discovered him with a noose in his cell. If people think that this exercise is largely academic, that the instances of people topping themselves in gaol are limited to Port Phillip prison, I have some sad news for them.

We know that 60 or 70 per cent of the people who are going to try to kill themselves will do so in the remand facility because that is where they go through the most significant crisis. We need to be absolutely sure that we get it right with this new prison and make sure that we have leadership in that prison which will not only prevent this sort of thing happening, but also prevent even the slightest suggestion of it.

One thing I must echo about what Mr Osborne said is that this report goes away from the warehousing concept and embraces the restorative justice philosophy. I could not support this concept more. The rehabilitation of prisoners is merely one element of restorative justice. For those who do not know what that is or cannot figure out what that is, we talk about restoring the person to the community and we talk about restoring the community after the damage that these people have done. We are talking about the total continuum of justice from sentencing through to full restoration, and the prison system has a vital role to play in that. (Extension of time granted)

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