Page 2539 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 August 2007
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The government claims that the prison will be run for not a dollar more than we currently spend in the New South Wales system. But this year’s budget details that the government will spend, on average, $490 per day on prisoners in remand. The government will spend $223 per day on prisoners in the New South Wales system. The average number of detainees in the ACT in 2006 was 172. At the current rate of expenditure these 172 detainees would cost the taxpayer nearly $31 million per year. This means that the much heralded economies of scale must equate to approximately an expenditure reduction of over $30,000 per day to be equivalent to the New South Wales system. The prison, in the context of the budget, still does not have an operating budget, and of course the prison was based on a false premise, with the government’s own numbers not reflecting the true position of the prisoner population.
It seems that the numbers have never added up. The population has never reached what the government studies showed it would. The prison has great potential to be a financial noose around the neck of the Canberra community for the next 25 years at least. And we have this government, particularly the Chief Minister and Mr Corbell, to thank for it.
It should also be noted, in the context of the budget and corrective services, that the ACT Human Rights and Discrimination Commissioner just discovered systemic problems in our correction facilities. And though Mr Corbell is eager to hang all of these issues on a new facility, perhaps the most important line for the government to respond to is this one: some issues are not dependent on new facilities.
I will touch on the issue of needles, which Dr Foskey has mentioned. If we are to have a prison that is going to work, the last thing you want to have is needles; they are a real danger to custodial officers. The whole idea is to get prisoners off drugs rather than maintain their habit. Prisoners affected by drugs have a real opportunity to get off drugs. At the very least there should be rehabilitation programs there to get them off drugs. One thing that gives me a little bit of hope on that score is that I have not heard of too many instances of people getting drugs in the remand centre. That area is kept fairly tight. The centre might have its problems, but I have not heard of drugs getting into the remand centre. If the prison is run properly, you might be able to stop that.
It would be good to have a secure mental health facility there; something that we were planning when we were in government if the prison went ahead. Clearly, a lot of prisoners had problems with drugs and suffered from mental health problems—and that needs to be treated on site. I think it would be utterly pointless having an argument that drugs should be supplied in the prison through a needle exchange system. That just perpetuates the problem; it does nothing to get rid of it. I certainly wholeheartedly object to that occurring. I am pleased to see that the government realise it. I think that is the right decision.
The upgrades to court security are welcome. The improvement to the DPP case management system is also welcome. Hopefully it will be able to provide more information on how the justice system performs. It is still a worry that we do not know how many breaches of bail conditions there are in a year or how many people have had bail refused in the Magistrates Court and then had it granted in the Supreme Court. I was trying to find out how many times that occurred in a year but I
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