Page 1444 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 6 April 2011
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MRS DUNNE: All you need are a few Slazenger balls and you can get your drugs into the prison. So we have got SOTER, we have got iris scanning, we have got sniffer dogs—and all of this can be confounded by a couple of tennis balls.
Mr Seselja: Isn’t it some form of Star Wars defence system?
MRS DUNNE: If it were not serious it would be hilarious. But this is serious. And this is a minister who has failed so comprehensively that all of the high-tech systems designed to intercept contraband coming in have been circumvented by simple tennis balls. We have got drugs, needles and razor blades found in the AMC, even very soon after the place was populated.
The RFID system is not properly functional. This was a system that was supposed to be built in with the prison. The government decided that, no, they did not want to do that; they did not think the contractor could deliver to spec, so they took it out of the contract and they are still attempting to deliver it. But there is a substantial cost to that and in a sense we have not got to the bottom of what that substantial cost is. But we know that there will be substantial overruns there.
Mr Seselja spoke yesterday about the high cost of prisoner days in the ACT and on top of that the capital cost of the beds in the ACT. This is the litany. We have got people who have been wrongly released. There are allegations of breaches of procedure and falsification of documents in relation to a death in the prison. There has been a rape and abuse of a detainee, leading an ACT Supreme Court justice to warn the ACT government that “if the community cannot protect someone who is detained then the community cannot expect them to retain that detention”. There have been lockdowns of prisoners which resulted in an email outburst to the Canberra Times. And all of this is added to the catastrophic and not very flattering report that Mr Hanson released yesterday, the Hamburger report, and an editorial in the Canberra Times saying, “Sadly, the centre has proven to be a shambolic disappointment.” And the person responsible for that shambolic disappointment is Simon Corbell. He is an incompetent minister and he deserves to be censured.
MR HANSON (Molonglo) (3.09), in reply: What a lacklustre, limp performance from Simon Corbell, Jon Stanhope and the Greens. This is a censure motion. I will tell you what Jon Stanhope said. He stood up in this place and, rather than defending the jail or defending Simon Corbell’s performance in the mismanagement of it, he decided to give us a history lesson. I do not blame him, to be honest, because he is far better off trying to talk about what happened many years ago than talk about what is happening under the management of Simon Corbell right now. I am not surprised he does not want to talk about that. Why would he? Poor old Jon gave that lacklustre performance.
He must be getting pretty tired, having to come down here and, if he is not defending Simon, he is defending Katy or he is defending Joy. He has got these three stooges. He has got to keep coming down to defend their inept performance. But the most inept of the three has to be Simon Corbell. The motion that I put before the Assembly today, the five pages of the litany of problems that each point has listed, the many dozens of points listed, in itself is a substantial issue.
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