Page 1395 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2006
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of crimes that really get on the goats of Canberrans. It is with this lower-level crime—burglary, invasion, vandalism—that our judicial system is letting our police down.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (4.31): The negativity of the opposition on these issues is so predictable that one wonders why we continue to engage in debate in the way we do. I think we need a much more constructive approach to these issues. It does sound as though we are all concerned about the same issues, but our solutions are quite different.
Mr Pratt interjecting—
DR FOSKEY: Some people are not very good about listening either.
I think there is potential for a tripartisan approach and I want to attempt to discuss that here. But I want to be very careful to avoid matters that are currently before the public accounts committee. What we heard from Mr Stefaniak is that the Liberals are not keen on us building a prison, but on the other hand they want tougher sentences. If my arithmetical skills are right, that means more prisoners. So far, we do not have the death penalty in Australia—and, hopefully, we never will—so prison is the toughest sentence that we can offer people.
What does that mean? That means that we just send them away—out of sight, out of mind. It does seem to me, from what I have heard today—there may be different, more nuanced opinions amongst individual members, but we do not get to hear them here—that prison is a black box to the Liberals; it is a place where you send people and they disappear for a while; the longer, the better. But what happens when they come back—because they do come back, because they live here? That is where it started and, if we do not have any control over the kinds of conditions that people experience in those black boxes over there, over the border, we have to deal with the consequences of what those people have experienced.
The Greens did not come easily to the idea of supporting a local prison. As Mr Corbell pointed out, we spend a lot of time sitting around in circles discussing things, but we do have certain principles that inform the decisions that we make, and social justice is one of them. That means that if you want to follow through those principles you have to agree with having a prison in the ACT.
Recently, a new group has arisen—
Mr Stefaniak: We are not disagreeing with that, Deb; we are just saying they have stuffed up the economy so much that—
DR FOSKEY: Yes, okay. We will have that later, thanks. No doubt you can respond later. This is my turn.
The main reason why the Greens have agreed to support the prison is that we need to make sure that our prisoners are subject to good rehabilitation programs. People are not prisoners just because they turn bad at a certain age; nor are people born bad. People might disagree with that, but I happen to believe that people on the whole cause crime due to life circumstances—and sometimes those life circumstances are set up very early on. That means that a prison has to be able to tackle very deep-seated behaviours, and
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