Page 205 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 16 February 2011
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board of inquiry. So the question should be asked: what has happened since that motion went down last year? The answer is: at least three incidents have happened that would necessitate this being fixed.
The first one we have seen is, quite clearly, that if you give information, you run the risk of having your details and your name exposed. That is a very serious concern. Secondly, we have seen a very serious assault on a guard. Thirdly, we have seen a promise from the minister broken. In the annual reports hearings last year, Ms Burch was asked by Mrs Dunne whether the problem of the detainees getting up on the roof had been solved, and Ms Burch said:
And I can add that we have fixed the roof problem.
She said that people cannot get on the roof. But since that time, the young people there continue to get on the roof. And how do we know that? We know that because I had someone ring me to tell us that, on the night of the assault on the guard, the two individuals involved managed to get out of their cabin and get on a roof. That youth detention officer has told me that it happens all the time and that they use the old pizza, sunscreen and water bottle treatment until they want to come down.
What we have is more and more detail emerging of the mismanagement of this portfolio by Ms Burch. People need to understand the seriousness of what is going on there. We have got large staff turnover. We are getting, I believe, inadequate provision of services to staff. One of the staff there has told me he is very concerned because he was told at his training course that you do not talk to anybody there. You do not tell anybody anything because nobody keeps a confidence.
I have also been told that the staff are told in training: “Don’t rely on your duress buttons because they don’t work. There are certain sectors in the compound where they don’t work and there are certain sectors in the compound where they give a false reading. So the assisting staff go running in one direction and you are in another direction. So don’t rely on your duress alarm.”
Why is it that we run a faulty system? Mr Corbell, the corrections minister, has had to shut down his system at the Alexander Maconochie Centre. How hard is it to build a brand new detention centre or a prison and get it right? Well, apparently, in the case of both these ministers, it is quite impossible.
On the night of the assault on the unfortunate MSS guard, apparently he was late to the cabin because he was a new guard and he did not have keys, he did not have a pass and, initially, he did not have a uniform. This stuff had to be issued to him. But when he got to the cabin he did not have his own keys. For those that have not been to the centre, there is a duty point and there is accommodation on either side of the duty point. Because the MSS guard did not have his own keys, he was locked in the cabin with the inmates. The two doors on the duty office were left open so that he could move through end to end. There are about six rooms at either end. So this guard was circulating up and down on his own and locked in under the watch of this minister. This is what the minister thinks is an okay system.
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