Page 1405 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 6 April 2011
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a lack of leadership across operations. This lack of leadership has resulted in unbalanced application of activities. This lack of leadership has in part resulted from a lack of clear policy guidance for the AMC.
I wonder who is responsible for clear policy guidance for the AMC if not the Attorney-General, Simon Corbell. Overall, the evaluation team concluded that there was an absence of clear policy guidance and governance and legislative structure, and so on and so on.
In relation to the problems that we are seeing at this jail, that have been found in the Hamburger report and the Burnet report—the Burnet report, 196 pages of damning evidence—what the evaluation team conclude is that it is as a result of a lack of leadership and a lack of clear policy guidance. And if the Attorney-General, the minister responsible, is not responsible for that, then who is? Who is responsible for leadership and who is responsible for policy guidance in this government if not the minister appointed to manage corrections in the ACT?
If you look through the Burnet report, the copy of it that we have been provided with, you will see that there are numerous problems. There are concerns about the human rights approach that has been taken, the way that is affecting security and individual responsibility, the effectiveness of some therapeutic programs, the testing regimes for hep C.
The evaluation team believes that both the data and the clinical practices relating to blood-borne virus testing and management are problematic. The current blood-borne type virus testing and vaccination practices and data reporting practices are inadequate. And the current system offers no way to reliably estimate incidents or prevalence of blood-borne viruses amongst the AMC population.
But worse, what Burnet found was that the way that the testing is being conducted, by testing for antibodies only, is throwing out false positives. And as a result, prisoners may be thinking that they are infected with hep C when they actually are not and that is encouraging them to conduct risky behaviours, be it including injecting drugs. I quote:
Inadequate blood-borne virus testing practices at the AMC are likely to have unintended consequences in relation to engaging in injecting risk behaviours among people who mistakenly believe they are HCV positive.
The way that they are running this jail is actually putting prisoners at risk; that is what has been found by Burnet. Strategies to prevent illicit drugs from entering the jail are failing. There are problems with the searching regime. Case management is totally inadequate. In regard to prisoner through-care, I quote:
The apparent absence of coordinated discharge planning and throughcare services is a major departure from intended drug services at the AMC.
Counselling is deficient. Limited individual counselling at the AMC is a major deficit. And there are literally dozens of quotes to support these.
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