Page 585 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 9 March 2011
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Simon Corbell said, “I do not know why that surprised you, Mr Hanson.” For him to say that it was always about bed capacity is absolute rubbish.
Are you going to swallow that line, Ms Bresnan? I do not think that you actually do. I think that this is all part of your just wanting to basically sing the government’s tune because it is quite clear that you want a needle and syringe program in that jail and your best ally in getting it is Simon Corbell, is it not? So you do not want to be rubbishing Simon Corbell. You do not want to be explaining to the community and holding him to account in the Assembly, saying, “This bloke is incompetent. This bloke misleads us all the time. By the way, this is the bloke that is going to put a needle and syringe program in there, as we want, as we are pressuring the government to do.” Maybe just in conversations behind closed doors it happened about needle and syringe program in the jail. I would not be surprised.
They cannot even drug-test the prisoners on entry to the jail. I wonder what other testing they are not doing. As I said, Mr Stanhope in his speech came up with a long list of what is happening. Mr Corbell has often said these things are happening at the jail. The operational RFID system, we know, is not. What other testing is not occurring? You have got real concerns about the medical testing, the testing for hep C and HIV, when they enter the jail. Is that occurring, Mr Corbell? Will you stand up in this place and say that that is all occurring, as you did for the drug testing? We will see. Probably not.
Then I said in my motion that there were extensive failures in the jail. If you cannot recall them, let me remind you of a couple. We saw the protests on the roof. We admonished Simon Corbell for prejudicing a case when that happened at the BRC. We saw human rights exacerbated at the AMC because of delays, and that came from the human rights commissioner. We saw the extensive delays.
We saw the cost blow out from $110 million to $130 million. We already know that it was reduced in scope from 375. There is no gym. There is no transition accommodation—sorry, there are 15 beds. There were meant to be 60. There is no chapel. We have the artwork, the lovely artwork, that was unsafe. If you went out there and you touched it, you would get a cut from the artwork. There was $100,000 on artwork, but no gym.
We have seen drugs and needles in there. We saw the security defects. I do not know whether security defect 2.6 is fixed yet. The RFID was late. Remember they gave it to the prisoners and the prisoners walked out of the jail with the RFID bracelets on. Now we are told it is not operational, although Mr Stanhope said it was.
We have seen the costs per prisoner. Mr Stanhope said that this is going to be cheaper than it was before—cheaper, remember? It was going to be half the price of sending them to New South Wales. It was $263 when we sent them to New South Wales. What is it, about $450? It seems to fluctuate around that. It was $500 but it is about twice what Mr Stanhope promised.
We have seen the funding for the human rights commissioner cut so that she cannot do her job and cannot see whether the human rights compliant jail is actually human rights compliant or not. Probably some of the prisoners will suggest it is not. The
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