Page 584 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 9 March 2011
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
misleads with regard to the jail or addressing the point about the litany of failures that we have seen at the jail and the incompetence that has come out of the minister’s handling of the portfolio, we have got some distraction. In itself, I do not really have too much concern with any of the points Ms Bresnan puts forward in her amendment.
The problem I have is that she has completely removed the original motion. Rather than addressing any of the issues that are in the original motion, she has completely got rid of that and gone off on a tangent. So the Canberra Liberals will not be supporting this amendment because it is what we have seen previously from the Greens, which is a tame response to an urgent issue, to an important issue.
I think that Ms Bresnan’s comment that the fake opening of the AMC, the election-stunt opening, six months prior to it being able to receive prisoners was a well-timed event is probably demonstrating quite what an apologist the Greens are.
Ms Bresnan: It is called sarcasm.
MR HANSON: Rather than being sarcastic, Ms Bresnan, and having a bit of a sarcastic dig and then ignoring the entire motion I have put forward, maybe you could deal with it. Maybe you could say that perhaps the community was somewhat outraged by virtue of the fact that the government went to an election with a big lie, with a big con, that this was a jail that was ready to be opened when we knew it was not, when it still had significant security defects, when it had a range of issues that precluded it being opened, and then, when they did put prisoners in there, they rushed them in and we saw a whole litany of problems. I will get to those problems before I conclude my speech.
But what is it, Ms Bresnan, that you and the Greens have problems with? The minister and the Chief Minister misled with regard to the jail receiving prisoners following the opening on the eve of the ACT election. So you have admitted it essentially. You called it a mistimed event. You have just said that it was sarcasm. So you are accepting then, I assume, by saying it was a sarcastic comment, that it was an election stunt. So you are not going to hold them to account on that one.
The next is the capacity of the jail being 245 when they repeatedly said it was 300. It was repeatedly said 300. Simon Corbell tried to cover it up by saying the bed capacity was 300. He never once said that. He said the prisoner population was going to be 300. He said the capacity, the number of prisoners it could hold, was going to be 300. He never said the number of beds was going to be. This was all of course following on from the fact that he had said in 2007 that this prison was going to be right for 25 years. And it was not.
So we are not going to hold him to account on that are we, Ms Bresnan? We are just going to accept that. “Do not worry; this is about operational capacity.” Simon Corbell said, “We have never said it was 245.” I am sorry, it was said quite categorically in the annual reports hearing by the chief executive of ACT corrections, Mr Ryan. He said that it was going to be about 240 or 250—the projected figure of, say, 245. He made it quite clear what that capacity was. I repeated it back to him and talked about it being a 245-bed capacity jail. That was the question I had: “And it now seems that we have a 245-bed jail at maximum capacity.” That was when
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video