Page 1666 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 4 May 2010
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first part, we have been there before. With the second part, yes, we have been there before. No 3, yes. Well, this is a lot of news, isn’t it? As we can see, there is not really much extra in here, although I did do something which Mr Seselja admitted that he had not done. He said at the tail end of his speech that he had not actually read all of the motion.
Mr Smyth: No, he said he could not read it all because it was so long.
MR HARGREAVES: Mr Smyth corrects me and says that Mr Seselja could not read it. A remedial reading class might be an appropriate way to go. Maybe that is the way to go. When I had a look at it, I thought to myself: “I can see an Underbelly vendetta here. I can see a full-on vendetta.” They say that we have done all these horrible things in the past, and Mr Corbell has been the subject of—blah, blah, blah. Then they say, “In the three months since the motion was debated in February 2010.” That means that, every couple of months, they will run a censure motion against Mr Corbell. So regular are they with it that Mr Corbell can actually schedule his family holidays around those particular events. In fact, we can do the same because they are as predictable as night will follow day.
The thing is, of course, that this is a one-sided argument. When you look at the contribution of a minister, you have to see whether or not there was any positive contribution as well, and whether the positive contributions outweigh the accusations—and I say “accusations”—of negative contribution. Let us have a bit of a look at this AMC, noting that it was in fact the Liberal opposition that wanted to take, if my memory serves me correctly, all of the medical services out of the thing. Mr Smyth was famous for saying that he would take the $100 million that we are going to use to do that and he was going to fix the hospital woes. He was going to take capital funds and fix the recurrent problem in hospitals. Even a year 12 student—Ms Hunter was there at the time—at Lake Tuggeranong college debunked that idea pretty smartly, and embarrassingly for Mr Smyth.
Mr Seselja did not want the prison; nobody wanted a prison. Now, all of a sudden, there is this high moral ground about its efficacy. I would like to know how many of those opposite can tell me how many prisons there are in Australia which are human rights compliant. I do not think they could tell me that. How many of them have the range of services and characteristics that this prison has? For example, it has all types—remand, sentenced, both genders, all categories of classifications in it. And it has an economies of scale problem, particularly in relation to the female prisoners contained therein.
It has a transitional release program, it has programs aimed at recidivism, and reduction of recidivism in terms of employment opportunities, and has engaged with the commercial sector to try and arrange for jobs for people when they leave. We have housing projects that the minister for housing has delivered for these people on exit.
We have family support. We actually have drug and alcohol services going on in there. And the thing is still not 18 months old. That is incredible, actually. We have a full-on community health centre in there. These are the same people that were screaming their little lungs out about the lack of health services, and yet we have a full-on community medical centre in there.
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