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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (21 June) . . Page.. 2384 ..

MR SPEAKER: Far from it, my friend.

MR HARGREAVES: If they went off to gaol, it would be upon their own head, but what about the family that was left behind? What is left behind is a family in total disruption, often in poverty, with all manner of disasters before them. They are socially ostracised. The kids cop it at school. Often people look at the woman, if she is a working woman, and give her a bad time. They come to grips with that, but we do not support that woman and her family. I have no sympathy for the person who has perpetrated the crime, do not get me wrong, but I have an enormous amount of sympathy for the innocent victims who are members of the family as well as the victims of the crime itself. They are collateral victims and we do not pick that up often. We do not pick up the fact that the children of such a family are not criminals but are also secondary victims. I am asking this government to provide funds to support those people.

I will put it to you in another way, Mr Speaker. We often find that the criminals come from a history of crime, where the grandfather is a criminal , the father is a criminal and the son is a criminal. Why do you think that is so? It is because the whole family environment lends itself to that. We can intervene in that by sending the first person off to gaol for corrective behaviour and then looking after the family and making sure that they do not fall into the same type of recidivist approach, the same sorts of approaches to crime. I am not talking about giving them jobs, giving them welfare and that sort of thing. I am talking about looking at their behavioural patterns. We could do that if we had the resources to do it.

We also know that the family unit is the best tool we can use to stop people being recidivists, but do we put any money into using it? No, we do not, but we could. Let us say that a person has been away for five or six years and that the wife and the kids had absolutely nothing to do with the crime at all. What we are actually seeing is the same sort of dislocation as the family of a member of the armed services would have if that person was missing for five or six years. When he comes back, he has to re-establish the family unit. Sexual relations need to be re-established. The peer pecking orders and the father/daughter and father/son relationships have to be redetermined. All of that needs to be re-created if that family unit is to remain intact. Do you know what we provide in the way of resources to help them, Mr Speaker? Nothing.

We may have offenders who deeply regret what they have done and really want to make amends to society and put something back into society-in other words, the success stories of the programs that we introduce-but we do not provide them with an environment for that to occur and, because we do not, they end up turning to crime again and off we go again on the merry-go-round. There is nothing in that budget in the outyears to cover that. I have to say that if Labor gets on the treasury bench after October, I will be seeking the support of my colleagues to make sure that some resources go that way.

The government did not provide sufficient money in the budget for the Belconnen Remand Centre. The government said in its response that it did, but it did not. The government has increased the number of cells available, but has not increased the staffing resources. I predict in this place tonight that, unless this government provides more resources for staffing at the Belconnen Remand Centre, we will have another

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