Page 2784 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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clearly establishes where the lines of responsibility fall with respect to the management of emergencies in the ACT.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo) (1.55 am): I am also mindful of the time, but I wish to make a few quick points about the proposed ACT prison. As has been raised, certainly by Mr Stefaniak and Mr Mulcahy, we are looking at expenditure of $128.6 million. The minister has said that that will be the maximum amount spent. The concern of members on this side of the chamber is that we have heard that before. We have heard it on the GDE and we have heard it on all sorts of other major capital expenditure and they have not come in under budget. Our concern is that we will get something that costs a lot more than $128 million or perhaps that we will get something that is nowhere near as human rights compliant as the Stanhope government would have us believe. Either of those, obviously, would be of some concern. It is incumbent upon the government to demonstrate how it is going to stay within those costs.
Another important issue in relation to costs is that we have not seen a proper demonstration of how the government is going to keep the recurrent expenditure at or below the level that we currently pay, which I believe is around $19.8 million if you combine the costs of the Belconnen Remand Centre and the costs of keeping ACT prisoners in New South Wales prisons.
One of the reasons I say that is that the cost of prisoners in New South Wales is, I believe, $202 per day but, of course, the New South Wales prison system is very large and has massive economies of scale. If you look, for instance, at Western Australia, I think you will find that the cost goes up to about $259 per prisoner per day. If the ACT, a much smaller jurisdiction, is looking at having the most human rights compliant prison in the country, you would certainly expect the cost to be much more than $260 a day. If you get well above $260 a day, you start pushing well above the $20 million a year figure in total for recurrent expenditure. It is of significant concern not only that we will have a capital outlay which may well be much larger than the $128 million that the government has said it is going to be, but also that it may well be, and we would expect it to be, much more than the $20 million recurrent expenditure that the government is claiming that it will keep it under.
We are going to face significant issues and challenges when this prison goes ahead just on the basis of our size, just on the basis that we will have only one prison in the system. We do need to hear from the government about how it is going to find qualified guards during the skills crisis, how they are going to be trained, what will be the cost of setting up that infrastructure and the extra corrective services infrastructure that we will need to service the prison and, an important one, how we are going to guarantee, with such a small jurisdiction and with such small prison numbers compared to other jurisdictions, that we will be able to provide for the variables of prisoner make-up. If, in such a small jurisdiction, we have a slightly higher proportion of, say, maximum-security prisoners, that will push the average cost per day per prisoner up significantly.
The question is: how, within those cost parameters, will we keep all of the different levels of prisoners? Of course, we would need a prison that caters for maximum security prisoners, for minimum security prisoners and for medium security prisoners, that caters for both men and women, and that caters for prisoners on remand. So we are going to be
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