Page 3283 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 16 August 2011
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My principal concern with the conduct of this inquiry is this. Madam Assistant Speaker Le Couteur, you are a chair of a committee. I am a chair of a committee. If we conduct an inquiry in this place, we receive submissions and, unless there is very good reason because of confidentiality, revealing personal information or something that might be slanderous, we publish those submissions so that everyone can see what we are thinking about and what has been brought before us. There is not one submission published. Not even the government’s submission has been published. There is not even a list of submissions in this very lengthy report. There are quotes from documents that the inquirer has had access to, but there is no copy of those documents.
I point directly to a matter that arose in question time today: the Oakton consultants report, which was presented to the government, to this minister, in December 2009. One month after this minister became the minister responsible, there was a consultants’ inquiry into the financial management and operations of Bimberi Youth Justice Centre.
We saw the minister evading answering the question: “Minister, have you read the Oakton report?” She evaded it so skilfully that, given her previous form, I submit to this Assembly that the minister has not read the Oakton report. I would give my eye-teeth to read the Oakton report, because the Oakton report highlights that in December 2009 they were warned that they were facing a train wreck. They were warned that the process of transferring the financials from Quamby to Bimberi was inadequate—that the amount of money set aside for the administration of Quamby was inadequate for the administration of Bimberi because of its size, the fact that it was spread out, the different configurations of the accommodations and the different configurations of the security system. There were a number of warnings. Oakton said, or this is what was quoted in this report:
Although Bimberi is a much larger facility—approximately four times the size of the Quamby site, with additional amenities such as an indoor sports centre, indoor heated swimming pool and full sized oval—and has a greater number of independent residential wings, the operational and staffing budget for Bimberi was transferred across from Quamby without enhancement.
The inquiry said that the government submission noted that there was an additional budgetary allocation—this was approximately $5.8 million—transferred from Quamby on its opening and that there was a one-off $710,000 transfer of funds at the same time.
In August 2009 the Community Services Directorate, DHCS as it was at the time, commissioned an audit. Oakton reported that insufficient funds had been allocated “for the ongoing operations of Bimberi, particularly if there is a significant increase in residential numbers”. They said:
Currently Bimberi does not have sufficient permanent and casual staff to deal with a sudden surge in resident numbers that would require Bimberi to operate at full capacity.’
Oakton went on to say:
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