Page 1300 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 5 April 2011
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A strong basis has been set for the culture and shared … values at the AMC … The AMC is unique in relation to other Australian prisons in the high level of attention paid to detainees’ human rights …
That is what it was supposed to be all about in the first place. It talks about:
… there is no evidence of a “human rights” culture problem …
And it says it:
… has good systems and processes in place to protect and uphold the human rights of detainees …
They use the word “pleasingly” They say:
Pleasingly … the issue of staff on detainee assault or staff using excessive force … is not an issue of concern.
Certainly, this report has a number of issues in it that need addressing. There is absolutely no question about that at all. Some of them are quite minor, and some of them are the sorts of things you would normally tackle anyway, once you have been told. One of them, for example, was that, in the food services department, there was not necessarily some fresh fruit juice available. So in all of these recommendations, all these points, it is going to sit up there as a negative service. It is easily fixed.
The point that I wish to make is that right from the very beginning we said this facility cannot be like any other facility in the country. It is considerably different from the other and newer prisons that were opened in the country in recent years.
After the private prison in Victoria opened at Port Phillip, I understand that there were something like 13 deaths in custody over an 18-month period. And that was because the systems and the infrastructure in there led to that happening. The other thing that happened was that they brought all of the people who were custodial officers at Pentridge straight into this new prison and this new regime. They were not prepared for it.
One of the delays that we encountered, of course, in the provisioning of the facility was because we were making sure that our culture in the Corrective Services officers was the right one, that the recruitment was done properly. And what you have seen in the last 18 months or so is that culture that was created is the proper one. It is not the same at Goulburn. It is not the same at Port Phillip. It is not the same in the Northern Territory. It is not the same at Risdon.
We have accepted our responsibility in this territory for the custody and the behavioural change of people who have transgressed the law. We have accepted our responsibility here.
I remind the house of what those opposite did in an election campaign not that long ago. There was $100 million put aside in capital funds. Ms Hunter was in the room in
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