Page 1386 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2006
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What is the vision of the government in relation to the justice area? It seems to be hell-bent on going ahead with the jail. You might find that a little bit strange for a left-wing, ideologically blinkered government, but it intends to go ahead with its jail. The other area, of course, is its obsession with human rights, which we heard about in an earlier debate today. I will come to that as well. Those are areas where I think some improvements and savings can be made.
As to the jail, I am very supportive of a jail and probably have been one of the main supporters of it since the start of this Assembly, for two reasons. One is that there are probably far too many people wandering the streets of Canberra who in any other state or territory would be in jail. Sometimes the courts even say that they would send them to jail except that they have no control over the system and what happens to them when they go interstate. Secondly, if we did run our own prison, we would be able, one would hope, to do a much better job than other prisons. I have no problems with that but the fact is that, because of the economic muddle into which this government has got itself, it is really going to have great trouble funding this prison.
The prison itself has been described by some as a Hilton hotel for prisoners and is not going to look like a prison. Be that as it may, it will be a very expensive prison. On present figures, which are quite old now and need to be updated by the minister, it will cost $128.7 million for a complex at Hume within cooee of the lucky residents of Jerrabomberra! There are still issues as to whether it is in the right place. The preferred place would be Majura, but the government seems to be hell-bent on going ahead with it at Hume.
The running costs have been conservatively estimated at $19.63 million per year. I think that these figures are a bit outdated, too. There will be, as we know, cells for 374 full-time prisoners. On current figures, which again I think are outdated, it is anticipated that $914 million will spent over 40 ears at a cost of $61,000 per prisoner per year. In reality, with the way expenditure increases with inflation, those figures are conservative and it will cost a lot more.
The committee I chair has also been told by the corrections people that there are about 200 corrections staff at present in the ACT and the number will rise to over 300 once the prison is up and running. That will probably means that the recurrent costs will be greater indeed than they are at present in terms of the 200 corrections officers plus the cost of sending prisoners to New South Wales. Of course, the complex is not going to be called a prison; it is going to be called the Alexander Maconochie Centre. We all know that Scottish prison reformer Maconochie was indeed a pioneer in his time, but I wonder why the government cannot simply call it a prison. Even Maconochie stated that offenders are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment, but he did not shy away from calling the place a prison.
There are some issues around that. Is that the best way in these difficult economic times of spending money? I do not think that it is. I say with some sadness that, because of the muddle into which this government has got itself, it needs to defer that project and it needs to spend that $130 million on other more telling and more needy pieces of government infrastructure and expenditure. For example, one of the promises that the government has committed to is modernising the Calvary intensive care unit, at
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