Page 504 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 10 February 2009
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Leader of the Opposition Bill Stefaniak and Liberal Senator for the ACT, Gary Humphries, today joined forces at the site of the Stanhope Government’s proposed prison at Hume to highlight the absurdity of spending $128 million on a prison which is not a must-have while closing … territory schools …
Mr Stefaniak went on to say:
This is the last chance to stop this madness of building a prison for … ACT prisoners and … remandees …
The last chance to stop this madness! That is the position of the Leader of the Opposition, the Liberal Leader of the Opposition, 18 months ago in relation to the prison. “This is the last chance to stop this madness.”
Mr Corbell: Crocodile tears.
MR STANHOPE: Crocodile tears. On 24 August, two weeks later, he was on a roll. The Leader of the Opposition and Liberal shadow Attorney-General issued this press release:
Leader of the Opposition Bill Stefaniak said today—
24 August 2007—
the Opposition—
with the support, of course, of his other colleagues, Brendan Smyth, Vicki Dunne and Zed Seselja—this is 24 August 2007—
will be moving an amendment to the Budget Appropriation 2006-07 to reject funding for the ACT Prison.
We might just go back and check the speeches by Mrs Dunne, Mr Smyth and Mr Seselja in the budget appropriation 2006-07 where the Liberal Party moved an amendment to the budget to remove funding for the prison. The Leader of the Opposition, the Liberal Leader of the Opposition and Liberal shadow Attorney-General, 15 months ago said:
However, the Opposition is not expecting—
this is the attitude the Liberal Party have to the prison, to prisoners’ rights and to the protection of prisoners, the humbug and the hypocrisy in this position, the bleeding hearts, the crocodile tears—
any change of heart by the Chief Minister because the prison has become a vanity project, an ideologically-driven prison that even judged by its own human rights’ benchmarks, is … doomed to fail.
Of course, there is another issue. There is another issue, of course, in any discussion about the prison and human rights. We see the bleeding heart here today from the
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