Page 2681 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 28 June 2011
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occurrences and that improvements are made to provide a better-practice, safe and secure environment for our young people in detention and for the staff that support them.
It is also important to note that the Keating and Tomas reviews and the change management initiatives at Bimberi are part of a broader suite of related activities that aim to provide improved support and care to children and young people at risk. These activities include the Human Rights Commission’s Bimberi reviews and the Community Services Directorate discussion paper Towards a diversionary framework for the ACT. I present the following paper:
Bimberi Youth Justice Centre—Reviews into 5 February 2011 incident—Government response to recommendations—Ministerial statement, 28 June 2011.
I move:
That the Assembly takes note of the paper.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (4.21): Firstly, Mr Speaker, I want to raise in passing a procedural issue that seems to have slipped into our practice—that ministers make ministerial statements which give them unlimited time and at the end of the ministerial statement move that the Assembly take note of the paper, therefore limiting the time that members may respond in after having sought leave. I will not take up 15 minutes anyhow, but it is a procedural courtesy that probably needs to be addressed by members of the government.
In relation to the government response to recommendations made in the Bimberi review of the 5 February 2011 incident, I welcome and thank the minister for this update, but I consider it only an update. There are some substantial matters which are missing from this. The previous statement, which outlined a range of recommendations from both the Tomas and Keating reports, also flagged that there were some recommendations that were not dealt with because there were outstanding matters in relation to disciplinary matters in relation to some staff. The minister has not reported on that. I presume from that that those matters are outstanding.
I also note that in neither of these statements has the minister made any comment or informed the committee about the fate of the young people who were involved in this vicious attack—whether charges have been laid and what is the outcome, if any. For completeness, at some stage the minister needs to come in and tell the Assembly about those things as well.
What we have here today is a litany of things that have been done as a result of this very disturbing incident on 5 February, which for the most part seemed to me to be about straightforward and obvious things that should be done in a youth detention centre if you have a properly run youth detention centre. On 5 February this year, Bimberi youth detention centre had already been running for two years—had been occupied for two years. Over that time, on a fairly regular basis, the Canberra Liberals had been drawing the attention of successive ministers to concerns about the operation of Bimberi youth detention centre. We were told that we were scaremongering, that
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