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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 8 Hansard (9 August) . . Page.. 2661 ..

MR HIRD (continuing):

in Mount Gambier, South Australia, run by Group Four from the private sector but with South Australian corrective service officers overseeing the operation. It is not a full hybrid operational system such as that recommended by our report, but it is very similar. I was particularly impressed with that model.

The committee recognised that it would be very difficult at this stage to implement a fully publicly operated prison in a jurisdiction such as the ACT, because we have had very little experience in running a prison system. Hence recommendation No 11. You need innovation and best practice, and perhaps the best of two worlds-the private sector and the public sector. This penal institution in the ACT will be a sole provider. So to get some form of competition you need to be able to contract out various things such as education, management of food preparation facilities, repairs and possibly other areas touched on in this report.

Page 22 of the report says that four or five sector managers would be responsible for discrete areas. There could be a custodial operations manager, a rehabilitation programs manager, a community relations manager and a justice manager. A service manager could look after catering and cleaning.

This does not remove the opportunity for the public sector and private sector to work together. This model has worked in other jurisdictions. A high degree of cooperation between the two groups would assist the good running of such a facility. We pay $11 million to New South Wales at the moment. That $11 million goes into a black hole and does not create any employment within the territory. The system the report recommends would create employment within the territory, and some of the services would come from merchants within the territory. Benefits would thus flow to the private sector.

Recommendation 13 touches on the staffing of the Belconnen Remand Centre. When we talk of Belconnen Remand Centre staffing arrangements, we need to take a number of matters into consideration. One is that these officers are all professionals who have certificates of accreditation. To work in the corrective services industry today, not only in New South Wales but throughout Australia, you need certificates of accreditation to show that you understand the task given to you. To my knowledge, all officers at the Belconnen Remand Centre, a facility that might be termed a mini-prison, have some form of accreditation. There is another employment consideration. The courts are staffed by officers from corrective services, who transport prisoners from A to B as well as working from time to time at the Remand Centre at Belconnen.

This is an excellent report. I commend it to the house, and I look forward to the response by the minister, Mr Moore.

In closing, I thank our secretary, my colleagues and all those who assisted the committee throughout Australia in its deliberations on this very difficult and very interesting topic.

MR MOORE (Minister for Health, Housing and Community Services) (12.11): There will be no further opportunity to respond to this committee report, with only six more sitting days. I thank the committee not just for this report but for their efforts on this issue through this Assembly and before. One of the very positive aspects of this project is that committee members tried to work as cooperatively as possible. Differences were

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