Page 616 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 9 March 2011
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one of the things that it found was that this minister was poorly briefed over a long period of time—and that poor briefing still exists today. This minister is incompetent. He should be censured, and the Greens should join with that censure.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment, Climate Change and Water, Minister for Energy and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (3.10): We hear myths in this debate from the Liberal Party—they are very good at propagating myths for the purposes of trying to advance what they believe is an argument. But we need to refute a couple of things. The first is that there is some paucity of drug testing at the AMC. Leaving to one side the failure that we have seen in relation to admission testing, which is about determining the drug-use status of the prisoners on their arrival at the prison for the purposes of identifying them as suitable or otherwise for rehabilitation, there is still the issue of drug testing within the prison once they are resident to determine whether there is illegal drug use occurring within the prison environment. In that regard, some facts bear repeating, and they are these: the AMC’s broad testing regime which has been occurring since the prison commenced its operation and during the 2009-2010 year—
Mr Hanson: I raise a point of order on relevance. Drug testing in the jail beyond entry to the prison is not mentioned in the motion and has not been mentioned thus far in the debate.
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ms Le Couteur): Please stop the clock.
Mr Hanson: It is relevant for the minister to talk about the issue at hand—the failure of drug testing on entry to the prison. But to talk about other drug testing programs which are not relevant to this motion is out of order.
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER: Thank you, Mr Hanson. There is no point of order. Mr Corbell, please continue.
MR CORBELL: How extraordinary! One of the grounds for censuring me is the drug testing policy at the AMC and, all of a sudden, it is not relevant to the debate. These guys cannot even maintain a consistent argument. I think the real reason Mr Hanson took his point of order is that he does not like these figures. These figures show that during the 2009-10 financial year the AMC’s testing regime resulted in 739 urinalysis tests being administered to a total of 344 prisoners. This is the testing that determines whether or not there is illicit drug use occurring inside the prison once prisoners are resident there. It is not the admission testing with which we have seen the problem. This averages to 60 tests per month for an average of more than 28 prisoners per month. That is in the order of 12 per cent of the prisoner population for the relevant monthly time period.
Mr Hanson can get up here and trumpet all he likes about how he wants to see better testing and how he has got a bill in this place that is going to mandate a certain level of testing. But what level of testing is Mr Hanson proposing to mandate? Five per cent—a lower standard than the current practice at the AMC. Here is Mr Hanson telling us his performance measure—five per cent—and we already do over double that every month. We certainly did that in the 2009-2010 financial year. That argument is simply false.
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