Page 1391 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2006
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Victims of crime need to be recognised and heard in our criminal justice system. To raise the status of victims, the government has expanded the availability of victim impact statements for sentences. Currently, victim impact statements can be tendered only if the offence in question holds a penalty of at least five years jail. We have lowered the threshold to enable victim impact statements to be tendered for any offence punishable by imprisonment for longer than one year and for the summary offence of common assault.
The government has also broadened the class of people who can tender a statement. Victims, parents, close family members of victims, people who are carers of victims, and people who are in an intimate relationship with a victim, such as a life partner, boyfriend or girlfriend, will all be entitled to make a victim impact statement. The government is conscious that victims often need to be encouraged to think about making a victim impact statement. Making a victim impact statement easier to make and available for a greater range of offences sends the message that the government wishes more victims to express their experience to the courts.
I turn now to the issue of corrective services. In the ACT today, our remandees are being held in substandard conditions in the Belconnen Remand Centre and the Symonston temporary remand centre. I invite any member who has not seen the remand centres to go and have a look, and I would be happy to arrange such a visit. These remand centres are completely unacceptable; there is no other way to put it. Our sentenced prisoners, in addition, are housed in a number of different facilities in New South Wales distant from their families, friends and other support central to their rehabilitation. These are the two reasons that we need to address this issue through the opening of the Alexander Maconochie Centre, the AMC, at the end of 2007.
The government is firmly committed to ensuring that the capital costs, one-off set-up costs or ongoing operating costs will not exceed the approved budget allocation. The capital funding for the construction of the project is $128.7 million. In the event that the tenders received exceed the approved budget for the main construction works, a range of measures will be implemented to ensure that the budget is not exceeded. That will potentially include adjustments to the project brief. If necessary, every endeavour will be made to maintain the level of amenity required to ensure that the AMC operating philosophy is not undermined. The one-off set-up costs for the AMC were approved by the government in 2003. An indexation was applied by Treasury to escalate these estimates into the outyears.
The key issue here, of course, is the quality of the rehabilitation and the quality of the detention environment. There is no way that we can say that the detention of remandees and others in the remand centres is acceptable. Go and have a look at those cells, go and have a look at those cellblocks, go and have a look at the environment that remandees and others have in that environment and you will weep. It is simply not acceptable.
That is the challenge that every other government in this place has welshed on, including the previous Liberal government. They at last decided that they needed to build a new prison to address the remand centre issues, and now the Liberal Party is walking away from that commitment, walking away from its obligation to provide safe and reasonable levels of accommodation for people who are detained against their will. That is a
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