Page 1294 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 5 April 2011
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MR SPEAKER: Order! Chief Minister, one moment please. Stop the clocks. Mr Coe, we will not have a running commentary from you on this debate. You will have a chance to speak in a moment if you wish. I asked for Mr Hanson to be heard in silence and I do not expect Mr Stanhope to be interjected on through his speech either.
MR STANHOPE: When you do go to the report you will see, if you read those parts and do not just skip over them, that they actually represent the facts and represent the extent to which Mr Hamburger acknowledges that the fundamentals being established at Alexander Maconochie Centre set the Alexander Maconochie Centre up with the capacity in the future of representing best practice in relation to corrections. That is the underlying finding—acknowledging, of course, that there are a whole range of areas in which improvement, as always, can be made. Of course, there is no service delivery by government anywhere where there is not room and capacity for improvement.
This is a new prison. It is something that we have not done before. We do not have a long history of management expertise, of corporate history or knowledge, in relation to the running of prisons. We have never done it. As a jurisdiction, we have done it now for two years and it has been a sharp learning curve for the territory and for staff involved. But go to the report and the underlying, fundamental findings and basis are that Alexander Maconochie Centre is well positioned, albeit with the need to address a range of issues identified by Mr Hamburger, to represent best practice corrections policy and delivery in Australia, which is what we set out to do.
We never imagined we could do this from day one. It would have been absolutely remarkable, as Mr Hamburger concludes, to think that from day one, as a new jurisdiction, managing its first-ever prison, we could have achieved that from the outset. But we are well on the way. The fundamentals are good, the staff are excellent, the philosophy and the policies represent best practice within Australia and we will meet our aspiration and our hope in relation to the Alexander Maconochie Centre.
But read the report faithfully—and I hope it is reported faithfully, unlike the draft Burnet report, which has just been outrageously reported in terms of the misinformation and the misunderstanding about what is a finding and what really is just an off-the-cuff remark or comment without any evidence or any substantiation, reported as fact. We are getting to the point now where throwaway off-the-cuff remarks are being reported seriously by the Canberra Times and the ABC as findings of fact when really they were uninformed, unsubstantiated, non-attributed comment.
This is a good report. Through its commissioning, of course—and I think we should acknowledge this—the attorney acknowledges our absolute determination to understand the fundamentals of the management of Alexander Maconochie. There was a preparedness to be open and transparent.
The attorney commissioned this report in a determination to be open, to be transparent and to be well informed in relation to the issues which a government should be informed about, should be transparent about and should be open about in relation to
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