Page 615 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 9 March 2011
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could say that it would remain within budget—and he still blew the budget. The $110 million prison became a $130 million prison, and it was smaller than it was originally planned.
And now we get to one of the issues that Mr Hanson has raised today, the 375-bed prison which became a 300-bed prison. It has been a 300-bed prison for a long time. As Mr Hanson pointed out to me today, I typed in “Corrective Services” and up came the Corrective Services website which says that the Alexander Maconochie Centre is a 300-bed facility; it has capacity for 300 beds is what it says on the website. But I was there and Mr Hanson was there when Mr Corbell was asked the question about the bunk beds and we had Mr Corbell saying: “I can’t imagine why anyone ever thought it was a 300-bed facility. It has never been my view that it was a 300-bed facility.” And we had the outgoing executive director of Corrective Services admitting that we were looking at a corrections facility of 245 beds.
In addition to this, we have had monumental failure after monumental failure in processes and equipment. The RFID system was not up and operational when the prison was built. That was one of the things that was taken out of the scope of the prison contract. That was not a money issue. It was because they could not get the prison contractors to build an RFID system that met their specifications. The problem may be that the RFID system will never meet their specifications.
We know that it does not work. We know that there have been issues with people walking out of the jail wearing their bracelets. There are now the issues of the impact that it has on people’s personal duress alarms and the fact that personal duress alarms are interfered with by the RFID system, and the RFID system has been decommissioned until that issue is addressed. With the government’s fixation on wonderful technology, first and foremost we have to look after the safety and the welfare of the people who work in the prison, and to have personal duress alarms that can reboot, turn off and give false readings is a matter of considerable concern.
On top of that, we have the amazing fiasco of the drug testing in the prison. We saw the smugness of Mr Corbell last year when Mr Hanson started asking questions about drug testing and how, when Mr Hanson was not satisfied with this and introduced legislation to put some guts around the drug testing regime, Mr Corbell said: “We do all of this drug testing. We have done so much and Mr Hanson doesn’t know anything about it.”
What we saw yesterday when Mr Corbell came into this place eating crow and saying “I was wrong, I misled the Assembly and I caused the Chief Minister to mislead the Assembly” all came down to the persistence of Mr Hanson in following up an issue that he believes needs to be addressed. By the minister’s own admission, the papers that were tabled yesterday show clearly that, because Mr Hanson was persistently following up this issue, asking questions on this issue, we eventually revealed that the systems did not work; that the assurances being given by this minister, who has no control over his department, were wrong.
There is probably much more to learn about what this minister knew and when and how badly he was briefed by his department. We need to remember that, when the justice and community safety committee inquired into the false opening of the AMC,
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