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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 6 Hansard (15 May) . . Page.. 1651 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

often-than-not response of a police officer in the ACT to a person presenting with what they think is a mental illness is to take that person to the psych unit at the Canberra Hospital.

We are pleased at the relationship that has developed between the Australian Federal Police and the crisis assessment team, but there is more that could be done. There always is. There is never enough money for these issues; we know that. But the response is not just to build another facility and go out on this campaign like a knight on a white horse suggesting, "If we built a time-out facility we would solve all our problems. We would not have this problem at the Belconnen Remand Centre if we could only build a time-out facility."

Mr Smyth's suggestion that we need to run a subsidiary or second correctional system is very novel. "We do not need just a prison; we need a forensic mental health facility as well. We are not building just one new facility to deal with forensic mental issues; we are going to build two." But I am pleased that at least the opposition now acknowledges that the range of people who come before the courts and the criminal justice system is a significant issue. The jails are full of just these people. What are you going to do about them? We have got 170 people in New South Wales prisons, and the same percentage of those people have these same conditions. They present in exactly the same way.

Mr Smyth: We were going to address it with the prison we would have built-the prison you won't build.

MR STANHOPE: You were going to build a prison for them? So you weren't going to build a time-out facility for them; you were going to build a prison for them?

Mr Smyth: A prison you are avoiding and delaying, making sure there is proof.

MR STANHOPE: I see. Mr Smyth was going to mainstream the forensic mental health needs. He was going to do it within the correctional system. So Mr Smyth's model is a remand centre, a time-out facility and a prison. So you have a time-out facility for people who are on remand, but people who have already been sent to jail with a mental health condition you bung in prison. You leave them there, and you deal with them in prison. You mainstream them, as we currently do.

So Mr Smyth has an interesting structure here. A remand centre and a forensic facility, which he calls a time-out facility but is actually another jail. It is a jail for people with a forensic mental health condition. That is what it is. Mr Smyth is now suggesting that people who have been remanded in custody who have a mental health condition do not need to be remanded. They are going to go to a mental health facility; they are not going to go to a correctional facility; they are not going to be actually locked up.

He goes further than that. He is not going to do anything within the mental health system about the 80 per cent of people he has identified who are in prison or who get imprisoned. He is not going to provide a separate facility for them to allow us to deal with their mental health issues. This is a simplistic piece of nonsense. It is grandstanding nonsense by an ex-minister with responsibility for these issues who did nothing in seven years and who is now in opposition and uses this sensitive issue of the needs of people with a mental illness to grandstand. This is appalling politics by you, Mr Smyth.

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