Page 3817 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 27 August 2008
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searches should fall into a legal black hole at the very time the ACT corrections system should be transferring prisoners into the new prison at Hume.
This is not a small embarrassment; it is a significant stuff-up. The Canberra Times quotes a concerned prison officer, who says:
Without strip searches, prisoners have little or no fear of being caught with contraband which can easily be hidden in clothes and the safety of all centre staff and prisoners is being put at risk.
The Canberra Times article goes on to say that detainees have been quick to take advantage of the ban on strip searches. Prison officers have told the media that prisoners have “used the new rules to step up the supply of drugs into the remand centre”, which is a concern. Prison officers say that “they fear they could be vulnerable to weapons smuggled into the centre”, which is also a major concern.
The minister is reported in the media as saying that he pushed through laws in the Assembly last week to solve the problem. In fact, those laws have not been passed; we are debating those laws right now. If the minister has been accurately reported in the media, he was providing the public with a false assurance. I ask him to clarify what he told the Canberra Times.
There is another major issue that ought to be highlighted in this debate. In his speech last Thursday, the minister was more frank about the failure of the government to put in place arrangements for an X-ray body scanner in time for the opening of the prison. We were told long ago that prisoners would be routinely X-rayed and that this would help avoid the need for strip searches or body searches. The opposition welcomed this. The X-ray machine was trialled at the Belconnen Remand Centre in late 2006 and early 2007—some time ago. After the trial of the scanner, an application was made to Corrective Services to obtain a licence to use the scanner at the new prison. The minister now advises the Assembly that permission has not yet been given to grant the licence.
After years of planning and preparation the machine is still tied up in red tape due to the ACT government’s own procedures. Again, this is an unacceptable farce. The minister needs to clarify to the Assembly how the situation arose. Was there a defect in the application made by Corrective Services? Are there problems with the efficiency of the ACT Radiation Council? It is untenable that on the eve of the opening of the prison the ACT community has no assurance that we will have modern scanning systems in place to ensure that weapons and drugs are kept out of this institution.
I have been pleased to see previous statements by the government saying that the Alexander Maconochie Centre will be a drug-free prison. The opposition has been concerned, however, that the government has been talking about this as a temporary policy position, one that is subject to review. It is very concerning to learn of the latest developments which have seen the strip-search powers banned from use and the X-ray machine not yet granted a licence. These two developments are a serious blow to efforts by prison officers to keep the new prison drug free and to keep weapons out of the hands of prisoners. The minister does have a lot of explaining to do.
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