Page 2891 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 19 September 2006
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We heard just two weeks ago from the shadow minister for education the suggestion that there should not be a productivity dividend in relation to pay claims currently being negotiated and presumably to be negotiated in the future. This is the Liberal Party position: we should simply pay the four per cent without any suggestion of productivity. Once again, where is the Liberal Party in government going to find the funds to support that particular regime and those particular policies? Mr Smyth wants an immediate additional 100 beds. Where is the Liberal Party, in the face of the cut to the fire levy and to the rates being suggested today, going to find the funds for that? Where are they coming from? Where are these additional projects coming from?
The Liberal Party claims it would abandon the prison. It has done it again today in this debate. Then again, in the budget debate, we heard one of the great ironies: “We will abandon the prison but we will build a new remand centre.” What have you costed the remand centre at? You are out there parroting from the rooftops that you will abandon the prison. You do not then go to the subtext, which is there in Mr Smyth’s report.
Mr Mulcahy, you have not been here for two years yet you are saddled with everything that all of your colleagues say. It does not matter whether you said it or not. Your colleagues in their estimates committee report promised a remand centre. We see this nonsense from the Leader of the Opposition—I think the Leader of the Opposition had not read the report of his colleagues either—just this week artfully, disingenuously, essentially dishonestly suggesting that there are only 115 prisoners or 130 prisoners in New South Wales; how could you possibly need a facility—
Mr Mulcahy: Point of order—
MR STANHOPE: I withdraw “disingenuous”.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you, Chief Minister. Be a bit more careful.
MR STANHOPE: I meant in an intellectual sense.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: That is not the way I judged it, Chief Minister.
MR STANHOPE: At the heart of the prison is a remand centre. The heart of the project is a new remand centre because the one we currently have is simply unacceptable. Nobody in this place who wished to be objective thinks otherwise. At the heart of the Alexander Maconachie Centre is a remand centre for over 100 potential remandees. It is a third of the establishment. Yet we hear just this week this talk about the number of prisoners in prisons in New South Wales, and we subtract that from the final potential total of beds at the Alexander Maconachie Centre without any reference to the fact that a third of the establishment is a remand centre. That is disingenuous. That is misleading. Here we go again: we will abolish the prison and redirect those funds into hospital beds, without any suggestion of how we will pay for the staff to staff an extra 200 beds.
Mr Mulcahy: It was costed in the election.
MR STANHOPE: No, it was not.
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