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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (29 March) . . Page.. 1046 ..

MS CARNELL (continuing):

part, to Canberra for training in the run-up to the 2000 games. Delegations from other countries continue to be hosted and a number of countries still have not decided where they will train or whether their pre-Olympic training will be in Australia.

As we know, almost all the Brazilian Olympic team will train in the ACT. Mr Rugendyke has made comment about the Finnish team, which will train here. As I said, the Netherlands Paralympic team will as well. I am happy to get more details on that. We are very pleased with the results. In fact, the problem was that there was really no more space, particularly in the AIS facilities, for more athletes to come to the ACT pre-Olympics.

MR RUGENDYKE: As a supplementary question, I ask the Chief Minister: What facilities will these teams be using when they are based in Canberra and what would be the total cost of refurbishment of grounds and sporting facilities to accommodate them if the AIS were full?

MS CARNELL: I am happy to take that on notice, Mr Speaker. I do not think that there is any extra financial requirement to upgrade facilities or anything like that; nothing that I know about at this stage. It would be minor, if anything. Unlike other cities in Australia, the ACT Government is not subsidising teams that have chosen to come to the ACT. In fact, we could have had many more if we had chosen to subsidise or give significant dollars to the teams. We decided not to go down that path, but to charge a commercial rate for the teams that have chosen Canberra. The approach we have taken has proven to be very beneficial to the people of Canberra.

MR OSBORNE: My question is to the Attorney-General, Mr Humphries, and relates to the new prison. Minister, I have been somewhat intrigued at the apparent turnaround from you on the issue of women prisoners for the new gaol. What is the Government's attitude towards women being included, given that the Justice and Community Safety Committee was, I think, unanimous on supporting women being included in any new facility?

MR HUMPHRIES: I do not think that I have been inconsistent at all on this subject. As far as I am aware, my view always has been the same, that is, that there needs to be a plan developed for the building of this prison and that it would be highly desirable to include as many different classifications of prisoner as possible in the new facility so that we are able to make the prison both cost effective and socially effective. If we have to put certain categories of prisoner in Goulburn, Junee or somewhere further afield, we clearly lose that social benefit and, to some extent, we may lose also the cost benefit of having them here. Our average prisoner population these days in New South Wales is about 136. That consists, obviously, of a number of categories of whom less than a dozen would be women, probably seven to nine would be women.

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