Page 5900 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 8 December 2010
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essentially to blow the whistle on what is going on there. I think that we have to honour the people who have done that, who will put their jobs in jeopardy because of the concerns that they have. It is not one or two people. It is not a couple of troublemakers. It is up to 10 people who have come to the opposition over the period of the operation of Bimberi to talk to us about these concerns. These concerns are growing and growing.
There are a whole lot of other issues but a lot of it boils down to the fact that at Bimberi for some reason—I do not know what it is and I am not making judgements about what the cause of these problems are—we cannot retain staff. We have intakes of new trainees—six, eight, nine, 10 at a time. They have had their nine weeks training and we are finding that after they have been on the floor for less than three months there might be two or three of those staff members left. They have all left. It was recounted to me that someone who had worked in youth detention in New South Wales came to the ACT, did the nine-week course and lasted three weeks before they left, saying that they had never worked in a worse place.
All of this, Mr Speaker, goes to the heart of the problem. It goes to the failure of the government to address the issues. It is not good enough to build a building and put up on the website that you have a human rights compliant facility. It is what goes on inside the facility that ensures whether it is human rights compliant. The complaints that I have received from staff, youth detention workers and teachers are that they are not able to do the things that they are supposed to do because they are so understaffed. Because they are so understaffed, we have an increase in violence and we have an increase in serious violence.
We should not accept that residents of a youth detention facility should assault staff on a regular basis. In question time in the last sitting I read out about 12 incidents that we know of of assaults ranging from what the minister has dismissed as minor spitting incidents all the way up to a serious assault by multiple inmates on one staff member. That happened nearly five months ago, Mr Speaker, and that staff member has not returned to work. I have spoken to him on a number of occasions and he is in no way mentally fit to return to work.
These are ongoing issues. It should not be the case that staff are left by themselves in a vulnerable situation. That staff member was left by himself to supervise a large number of detainees and residents on a playing field. They were so short staffed that one of the other staff had to leave and when he was left by himself he was savagely assaulted. This should not happen in Canberra in 2010 in a human rights compliant detention facility. This is the problem that we are facing.
Mr Speaker, we have thought about this very seriously in the Canberra Liberals. We believe that an inquiry under the Inquiries Act, which is a very serious step to take, is the only way that we can address this issue. It ticks all the boxes. It is independent of the government. It is not funded by the department and it cannot be interfered with by the department. It is an independent inquiry. It has the power to compel witnesses. It protects witnesses. It means that witnesses give evidence under privilege. These are important issues that we need to embrace to ensure that we have a proper, thorough inquiry.
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