Page 3482 - Week 08 - Thursday, 23 August 2012
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a police officer was assaulted or other crimes were committed against police, they would become aggravated offences. The penalty for those assaults and other crimes would have been about 25 to 33 per cent higher than normal crimes. That would have sent a very clear message to the judiciary and to those who decide to have a go at our police force that that is unacceptable and they will be punished. It is very disappointing that, as our police are there tonight keeping us safe and keeping our families safe, we could not keep them safe. That is a shame on this government and it is a shame on the Greens.
An area where we do not get value for money is corrections. The cost of a prisoner per day is $422. When we sent our prisoners to New South Wales it was $263. Based on our present population, that works out in the order of $15 million a year more to run corrections than if we had been sending those prisoners to New South Wales. When you look at the litany of failures we have seen in our jail and, indeed, when you talk to many of the prisoners and read the Burnet Institute report, it is quite clear that, when it comes to rehab and education programs and so on, many prisoners got good if not better access to programs in New South Wales than they do here in the ACT. That particularly applies to female prisoners. Because there is such a small number of them, they have significantly limited access to many of the programs which are available to the male prisoners here in the AMC or, indeed, which were available to them in New South Wales.
I remind members that when this prison was opened and the price blew out by about $30 million and the number of beds reduced from 374 to 300, the then Chief Minister said that this would cost no more than it would cost to send prisoners to New South Wales. That was not true. Like so much else that this government has told us, it has not come to fruition, and this is costing our community $15 million a year more. What could we get for $15 million in our health system? I reckon you would get a better emergency department than we have got now if we were to put that $15 million into our emergency department.
That is exactly what the Canberra Liberals argued for in 2004. We said: “Let’s not build a jail. Let’s put that money into our hospital.” They were talking about the capital back then, but it is quite clear that that would have been the operational costs from 2008 when it opened—2009 if you want to say when it became operational—through to today. Literally tens of millions of dollars have gone into that jail that could otherwise have gone into a hospital. I think we all see the consequences of that decision.
The jail is already full; it has reached capacity, a capacity that Simon Corbell said in a committee hearing in 2007 would be enough for 25 years based on its current bed configuration. Within literally 18 months of the jail opening, it was full. Another mislead by the government, and it is going to be another cost to the community. There has already been retrofitting of bunks and costs to try and refit the jail so it can take more prisoners, but we have got more costs to come.
Finally, despite the problems we have seen in the jail, despite the complexities of managing a jail in a small jurisdiction, despite the fact we have got sentenced prisoners, remand prisoners, male prisoners, female prisoners and the ongoing
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