Page 2686 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 29 June 2010
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have received a little bit of a better response to the recommendation on a formula for growth for disability. There are synergies and there are similarities between the services. We also know that with Disability Services we are not talking about throughput; we are talking about growth.
With Health we are talking about services provided to different people and a growing number of different people. With Disability Services we are talking about a growing number of the same people. When you get a disability client you get them for life. So it is an exponential increase. I was hoping to see a growth formula put in there or even an undertaking to take it to Disability Services. I just voice my slight disappointment with that.
The final point that I would make is in relation to the response to recommendation 34, which talks about the establishment of a strategic indicator for the Department of Justice and Community Safety to monitor the proportion of sentenced prisoners who are repatriated from New South Wales and the number of first-time prisoners that are incarcerated at the Alexander Maconochie Centre.
The government’s response to the recommendation states:
It is not clear how the additional strategic indicators proposed would assist in determining whether the Government’s objectives for the ACT Corrections system are being achieved.
It goes like this: the biggest barrier for people’s restoration back into the community is the extent to which trauma has been visited upon them within a corrections system elsewhere. I believe there is a very big difference between the attitudes and the hopes of those people who have come to us from Goulburn and elsewhere and those people who are exposed to our corrections system for the first time.
This is because they will not, we would hope, have the brutality and the archaic penal system visited upon them which is evident from Goulburn, Singleton and the rest. We have to be very careful in measuring our recidivism rates after a number of years. We should be looking at those indicators. But the rate of recidivism, in fact, will be determined by whether or not those particular people have the will not to reoffend.
If they have been turned from rank amateurs into hardened criminals they are going to have more of a determination to reoffend. So I believe that we should be drawing a line between those two types—those people who we have repatriated from New South Wales and those people, if you like, who are more home grown. I think that is why we wanted to see those strategic indicators put into the annual report. I put out another plea for that.
I thank the government very much for their response and I thank them very much for smacking the Liberals while they were at it.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
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