Page 5356 - Week 14 - Thursday, 19 November 2009
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There was no analysis anywhere by the government. All that the ministers received was factual information in relation to these things. There was nothing that said, “Here are the delays and the implications for that are X, Y and Z.” There were no alarm bells ringing, it seems, anywhere in agencies to say that there was anything wrong with this. It was like, I suppose, the boiling frog principle. You put the frog in the water and the temperature goes up, you have a few days delay and you do not think anything more about it. But when the frog has really boiled, it is too late to do anything about it and there has not been any contingency in the whole process.
The committee made a number of findings in relation to the impact on prisoners. There are some interesting things in that regard. From December last year, sentenced prisoners were not being moved to New South Wales. There is no satisfactory explanation as to why that happened. In fact, the evidence that we received from officers from Corrective Services and the evidence that we received from the New South Wales prison service were quite contradictory. There was never a satisfactory explanation given to the committee as to why prisoners were not transported interstate.
We made findings that the delays had exacerbated the already bad conditions at the BRC. We noted that eventually, when the Quamby remand centre became available, Corrective Services officers acted quickly to alleviate some of those particular problems by opening up the old Quamby site for remandees.
A number of findings, 15 to 22, relate to what was missing from the prison at the time of its opening. The RFID, the radio frequency identification system, is not installed and there are recommendations in relation to the radio frequency identification system, requiring the minister to report to the Assembly on when it is completed and installed and at what cost.
The committee was concerned that there is no uninterrupted power supply for the building management system, so that if the power goes out, some of the security system may go out as well. We recommend that those problems be addressed and that the minister report to the Assembly. We also made some assessments in relation to what has now become the famous defect 2.6 involving the hierarchy of the security system and the master control system, which is unresolved. We ask the minister to report on that as well.
One of the principal findings that the committee made in relation to the security system was that, unlike almost every other part of the contract, the contract for the security system was a design-and-build contract. Chubb, who eventually received the contract, not only had to install the security system but they had to interpret a very large brief of some hundreds of pages and turn that into a system that met the requirements in that. Part of the problem, again, was communication—what people put in the brief and what Chubb said they brought out at the other end did not always marry up. This is an ongoing matter of negotiation and mediation between the contractors.
This was an unusual inquiry in that most of the inquiry was conducted in camera and large elements of the evidence have not been published by the committee. We take this very seriously because it is a departure from the practice of committees in this
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