Page 4231 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 21 September 2011
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Amendments agreed to.
MR SPEAKER: The question now is that the motion, as amended, be agreed to.
MR HANSON (Molonglo) (5.12): Firstly, I would like to thank members, both the government and the Greens, for their contribution in supporting this motion. It is an important motion and it is an important outcome.
The government say that they are doing this anyway, but I think it is difficult to believe that when they have had to be, to an extent, dragged kicking and screaming so many times on these sorts of issues.
It remains clear that Mr Corbell has been confused about the difference between the Indigenous liaison officer and the Aboriginal liaison officer in both his correspondence to me and in his speech today.
I would also like to clarify in my motion that I want the government to be reviewing all aspects of the royal commission into deaths in custody that are applicable to correctional facilities in the ACT. I do not want that to be narrowed. They need to look at the royal commission and its recommendations to make sure that all of those recommendations that are applicable to the ACT are being looked at in detail and to make sure that we are applying them as they are meant to be applied with the best practice case. No, it is not a narrow view; it needs to be done properly.
Mr Corbell, when speaking about one of the prisoners, said that there was no evidence or no confirmation that the prisoner who was stockpiling methadone was doing so with the intent to self-harm, but I would like to quote from the incident report, the reportable incident synopsis from ACT Corrective Services. It states that prisoner B stated to the corrections officer, and I will not say the name of the corrections officer:
… that he had been storing the Methadone for a period of time and that he was going to use it to “Do the same thing”. This was taken to mean he intended to overdose on Methadone. Mental Health staff informed of this statement.
There is a discrepancy between what Mr Corbell is still saying and the advice that has been provided in the incident report by his own department.
Ms Gallagher has had a role in this as well. I have heard her comments in the media, trying to play this incident down and saying, “We have only had three incidents of methadone overdose.” Three is three too many. It is quite clear that in this case this is not a simple case of a maladministration of a medication; this is a situation where a prisoner was able to stockpile methadone with the intent of doing self-harm. The implications of that go well beyond simply a maladministration or an overdosing of this medication.
The government have said that they have nothing to hide when it comes to this. I look forward to seeing all these reviews that they are going to provide to us; I really do. This is a government that say that they have nothing to hide; yet when, as I understand
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