Page 5899 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 8 December 2010
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Throughout the meeting that was supposed to be arranged for staff to air their concerns, the minister interrupted us and spoke over us. While the Union Delegate was reading out the list of staff concerns she totally cut him off and he never got to finish reading it.
As to management practices, the worker commented:
The problem, as I see it, is at Management level within Bimberi. On one hand the Minister is saying she wants Youth Workers in Bimberi, not guards (that is also the sentiment of 100% of YDOs)—
youth detention officers—
but then you have Management telling us that Bimberi is a para-military organisation and if we don’t like it, suck it up or leave.
This worker summed up the meeting as follows:
Most of the staff left the meeting frustrated, saying that the whole thing was a publicity stunt and as Joy Burch stated she was “covering her backside”.
These are just a small summary of the comments that I have received following that meeting and only a small summary of the comments that the members of the opposition have received over many months about the problems at Bimberi. My colleague Mr Coe will dwell more on those.
After the meeting I received a call from another person who said that they were horrified at Minister Burch’s behaviour, confirming the actions and words of the minister that were earlier outlined in the email that I read out. The caller told me of attacks by staff on detainees. In one case a powerful former adult corrections officer hit a young, very small detainee with arrested development and intellectual disabilities. It seems that this matter has not been dealt with.
In another story reported to me, a youth detention officer strangled a detainee, causing excessive bruising and laceration. Since this incident it appears that the same youth detention officer has been promoted to a team leader position but it seems, according to what I have been told by the staff, that the assault has not been addressed. I have been told that some staff, out of desperation, have approached authorities—I have been variously told either the Ombudsman or the human rights commissioner—about these actions.
But what this shows, Mr Speaker, is that the staff are frightened, frustrated and scared. They are frustrated because they cannot deliver the services that they are employed to deliver and they are not being given support by their own management. The fact that they feel they are not being supported by their own management and going outside the organisation to speak to the opposition, to speak to the human rights commissioner, to speak to the Ombudsman shows the level of concern.
Mr Speaker, I have to put on the record that in the nearly 10 years I have been a member of this place and in the years before when I worked as a staffer in this place, I have never encountered a situation where so many people independently have come
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