Page 1665 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 4 May 2010
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prison officers have been punished and demoted and other prison officers avoided that by resigning beforehand? What does it say about the culture that Simon Corbell wanted to establish? He was not going to have a culture like the New South Wales prison system. We were going to have a better culture than that. At the very first hurdle, we find prison officers who have been punished or who have resigned to avoid punishment because they falsified records about the death of a prisoner.
This minister has overseen that. He has overseen all of these failures. He has overseen the extraordinary rooftop protest. That is the sort of thing that you see in Third World countries, not in the capital of a First World country with, as Mr Seselja called it, a rolled gold human rights compliant prison. That is what you will see in Third World countries. We now have Third World standards in the administration of prisons here in the ACT. We have the continual lockdown and the absolute disgrace.
This human rights compliant prison was going to provide an environment where people would be gotten off drugs, where there would be drug programs. I think every member of this opposition has had briefings from agencies who are attempting to provide drug programs in the prison. We have been told over and over again that there are drugs in the prison, that there is needle sharing in the prison, that there are clear breaches of security. At the same time, they are not able to get in on a continuous basis and implement proper programs because of the failure of the system to have enough staff on board to allow them to run the programs. We all know that drugs are one of the reasons that people end up in prisons and that the first thing we should be doing is getting people off drugs. But no. Mr Corbell just shrugs his shoulder and says that there is always going to be contraband in prison and he is not responsible for that.
This minister has failed. It is clear. The Greens are in denial because they are in an alliance with the government. They cannot bring themselves to vote down this appalling minister for his failures in this case. They are a disgrace as much as this minister is.
MR HARGREAVES (Brindabella) (11.29): I would like to thank Mrs Dunne profusely for saying nice things about me because I can probably not contest the next election now; I have just about done it all. That is great. I thank her very much for that. I also thank her for the entertainment because she did look like something out of the Muppet Show. She was shaking and she was really going nuts. She was throwing her hands around and really not making a lot of sense. It was a bit like Dickie Knee on that Saturday night show who waves himself around in mock outrage. She also—
Mr Doszpot: You’re sounding very much the same, actually.
MR HARGREAVES: Thanks, Mr Doszpot. Your contribution is absolutely noteworthy—noteworthy for the absence of any real contribution. Mrs Dunne just went on a tirade. She was guilty of the very thing that Mr Seselja was accusing this side of the chamber of, and that is not actually addressing the motion. All that she really did was to yell out and scream out, repeatedly, that Mr Corbell was a terrible minister.
If you have a look at this motion, Madam Deputy Speaker, you will see that we have been there before. This is a little bit like Groundhog Day. If you have a look at the
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