Page 1031 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 30 March 2011
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followed. Some of these were covered in the statement by the minister yesterday. But the statement just reads like an indictment of the failure of the minister and the department to make this place secure for those that work there and for those that are held there.
It is a damning indictment. It is an indictment that says that what we need is the inquiry that Mrs Dunne puts forward. And we will pursue this because it is worthy of a full inquiry. It is worthy of this place saying that we do take this far more seriously than we are currently taking it.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (11.19): The Canberra Liberals will not be supporting Ms Hunter’s amendment today. I think that it is very disappointing—and Ms Hunter is obviously feeling the pain of this issue; she has come very late to this; and this is an area where I think that she feels that she has some special knowledge; and I think that that is the case—that what we are seeing, with the performance of the Greens in relation to the whole issue of Bimberi and youth justice and the problems that we have encountered here, is that they have been too close to the government for so long that they cannot extract themselves, even when the evidence is mounting, the information is mounting, that the system is broken, not just that Bimberi is broken, not just that the inquiry, the review, is being corrupted by the influence of people inside the system but everything else that has happened. The statement made yesterday by the minister in relation to the MSS security guard, more than anything else, shows just how broken Bimberi is.
Ms Hunter’s comments yesterday and her speech today are in fact a speech in favour of the motion moved by the Canberra Liberals. She knows how broken this system is but she cannot extract herself. She has relied on the government to tell her that everything is all right at Bimberi. She has taken the briefings and she admitted yesterday that she was misled by those briefings. Now she has to extract herself. But she is so tied to the amendment that she put forward—she is committed to the people in the inquiry—that, in doing so, she cannot actually extract herself and take away the personal involvement and look at the facts clearly and honestly.
As to the people involved in the inquiry, there is a substantial team, some of whom I know by reputation, some of whom I know personally. There is no doubt, for instance, that, when the art teacher was on 666 yesterday morning, she said she had a high level of regard for the people who are conducting the inquiry. But it is clear, and it is increasingly clear, that they will not be able to get to the truth because the system is being nobbled.
We need to go back to the first debate we had about this. Ms Hunter, Ms Burch and in fact the commissioner at the time said, “Don’t you worry, we have all the powers we need.” That is not quite the case. The Canberra Liberals tend to get criticised for making FOI requests. The Canberra Liberals made an FOI request into the process of establishing that review. That review was set up by this Assembly on 8 December. Admittedly, there were the Christmas holidays but it took about six weeks for the minister to sign off on the commission because there were pages and pages, backwards and forwards, of correspondence between the commission and the Department of Justice and Community Safety about how the powers were not quite
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