Page 247 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 10 February 2010
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The report provided by the JACS committee debunked the repeated claims by Simon Corbell, the minister, that all the delays we experienced were due solely to the security system and the fault was that of the security contractor. The committee found that “not all the delays were due to the security system as the Attorney-General contended”. I remember this quite clearly: when the Attorney-General was called before the committee, it was not his fault; no, it was Chubb’s. He blamed Chubb. He blamed the contractors. Remember that? None of it was his fault. And we heard that yesterday again.
He wanted to make sure he had the privilege involved in speaking in the Assembly. He told the media that he would be making that speech. He did not dare do it in front of the media as you normally would at a lunchtime press conference.
On 11 September 2008, Jon Stanhope opened the facility, with great fanfare, and told the media:
Opening the new prison means that we can now—
and I underline “now”—
take responsibility for our prisoners, ending the practice of sending prisoners to New South Wales.
Quite simply, this was an election stunt. It could be interpreted in no other way.
The inquiry found that the jail “was clearly not ready for handover”. And that was in February 2009, five months after the official opening on the eve of the 2008 election. The committee found that in February 2009, when the committee undertook a site visit, AMC was clearly not ready for handover. And it was apparent to committee members that considerable work still needed to be done.
Another finding from the JACS committee was that at the time of the opening, the minister was not appropriately briefed on the delays. It is the minister’s responsibility to make sure his department is briefing him on delays, particularly when, as it was noted at finding 13 in the report, in the period leading up to 11 September, in the previous six months, there had been eight delays.
What was delivered was not the jail as it had been originally envisaged, as was scoped. But we find a jail now that does not have a gym, that does not have a chapel. The outer perimeter fence that was envisaged is not there. The 370 beds which were planned were reduced to 300, 60 transitional beds reduced to 15, and so on.
I would like now to turn to the human rights issues that the government continues to lecture the community, particularly the Canberra Liberals, on. I would like to make the point that human rights should not be used as a shield to cover up incompetence and mistakes that have been made. You do have cost blow-outs. You have security breaches. You cannot continually use the line “it is all about human rights” as an excuse. We support human rights endeavours. We want to see the jail be as humane as
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