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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 12 Hansard (7 December) . . Page.. 3896 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

There are some lessons to be learned. The government needs to be careful about relying entirely on the input from consultants. They obviously need to use consultants because, as they have admitted, they do not have a lot of in - house capacity. They need to take the input from consultants and do some in - house analysis of it and derive from that their own courses of actions rather than blindly following what the consultants recommend to them.

We are dealing with people. We are dealing very largely with disadvantaged people, many of them with drug dependency or involvement in some way with drugs. There is a very high incidence of drug usage associated with crime. We are dealing with a special class of person here. If we hope that these people, at the end of a sentence, are going to come back into the community and be better citizens than they were when they went to prison and make a contribution to society, then we have to look at the material we are working with and, within the prison system, devise for them programs that affect their way of looking at life and modify their behaviour, their attitudes towards work, their attitudes towards education - the whole spectrum of human behaviour.

I do not know how easy that is going to be. But if we are just going to have a prison, put people in it and, as somebody said, turn the key and throw the key away, it is not going to be very beneficial to the prisoners and it is not going to be very beneficial to the community. This is not going to be cheap. It is going to cost us a good deal of money.

I commend the report not only to the Assembly but to the minister. I would hope that the minister would give careful regard to the things that we brought back from other jurisdictions, which he might find interesting, just as we did.

MR OSBORNE (8.03): I did not take part in the trip. I was a little bit nervous about some of the recommendations. I appreciate what they must have gone through when they put the Magna Carta together. This whole process felt somewhat like that.

Mr Moore: No consultation; they just wrote it.

MR OSBORNE: They just wrote it. I felt like that at stages too, Mr Moore. Nevertheless, the goal of the committee in this whole prison project is to continually provide as much information as we can to the Chief Minister on this issue. The one issue I was a little bit nervous about is recommendation 1, but with the modification I am quite happy with it. The government had given a commitment to come back with some information.

I, as an individual, am not prepared to make a substantive recommendation on public versus private, although there is much in this report that I do agree with. Many of the arguments put up by Mr Hargreaves and Mr Kaine are very good ones, but I prefer to reserve my judgment until we get more information from the government.

It is very clear that the committee, especially Mr Hargreaves, has a very strong commitment to this prison. In fact, Mr Hargreaves drives me crazy about it sometimes. I have told him that. All of us have different issues that we are very passionate about, and it is pretty clear that Mr Hargreaves is passionate - sometimes I have used the word "obsessed" - about this prison. He is a great source of information, and I am sure that he will take great pride in the prison when it is finally opened.

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