Page 3096 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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MR HARGREAVES: Madam Assistant Speaker, I remember your ruling. Through you, Madam Assistant Speaker, I want to address some of the issues that Mr Hanson was talking about. He was talking about two major ones, as I understand it. I think I have just got time to address those two. One was about the drugs paraphernalia and the other one was the New South Wales opportunity. I will go to that one first.
I said, and I will have to paraphrase it a bit, “I will look at it after the place has been open for about 12 months, in the same way that we are talking about any other trial of new things that we are going to go on.” I want to make sure, for example, that all the building warranty things have been ticked off. I want to make sure that the exit strategies, where we talk about the programs into the community post release, are working. We have got to make sure the transitional release is working. It is all of those sorts of things.
I looked into this particular issue 10 years ago, when I was the shadow corrections minister. It is not as straightforward as ringing up corrections in New South Wales and saying, “Would you like to send somebody here?” We have got a couple of issues. Jurisdictional authority is one; it will probably require a change in legislation for the ACT side as well. The point is that that takes a bit of time. I have said on the record, “Give us 12 months and then we will see how we are travelling.” That is what is going to happen. Whether you like it or not, that is what is going to happen.
With respect to the drugs paraphernalia, we believe that the items were brought in from the other institutions, and it is suspected that they were brought in internally. We do not at the moment have in operation a machine called the SOTER system. The SOTER is an X-ray system. That is currently with the Radiation Council for them to clear. The technical part is clear but the ethical part is yet to come in. Once that SOTER is done—we believe that that probably would have prevented the entry of that stuff into the centre.
Mr Hanson: Why didn’t you do the audit of the security systems like that before moving in?
MR HARGREAVES: The SOTER technology was submitted to the Radiation Council months before the prisoners were accepted.
Mr Hanson: But it was not ready to go.
MR HARGREAVES: I have given Mr Hanson the explanation, Madam Assistant Speaker; I am not going to go down there very much further at this particular time. We can have a conversation about it in more detail some other time.
It is an inalienable fact, though, that we transferred all the ACT prisoners into the AMC. We have brought our interstate prisoners home; we have closed Quamby; and, importantly, we have closed forever the Liberal Party’s preferred jail option, the former Belconnen Remand Centre. The Leader of the Opposition did not want it; Mr Smyth did not want it. To Mr Hanson’s credit, he did want it, but he wanted it quicker. And now he wants to fill it up. I wish they would get their story right.
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