Page 2597 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 7 August 2013
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amendment which I think paints a more accurate reflection of why we do not have this facility in the ACT, why it has been delayed, why there is confusion and delay around this project and which makes it very clear who is responsible for that.
We support this facility; it has enjoyed bipartisan support. It is a missing piece of our mental health spectrum. There has been debate about the best location for this facility, but, yes, we support it. But the reality is that after eight years of it being promised we are really no further advanced to it being built. At this stage it is not going to be completed until May 2017, and that is just what is projected. Based on the way this project has been progressed, that is a very optimistic assessment. And that is 12 years after it was first promised by those opposite.
It was first proposed on 30 May 2005 by the then Chief Minister and the then Minister for Health, Simon Corbell. This was labelled as a new way forward for forensic mental health. The ACT Labor government announced at that point:
…the provision of facilities for the secure detention, treatment, and care of offenders and alleged offenders, including a secure facility located at the Canberra Hospital for short and medium-term care …
So that was in 2005. Then it took a couple of years before we actually saw any funding for that. An amount of $1.2 million was allocated for the design and planning of the facility in the 2007-08 budget. The 2008-09 budget provided $11.6 million in capital funding and said it would be completed in September 2010. So it is about three years ago that this thing was meant to be built and operational. At that stage the government said:
This provides for the construction of a 15 bed Secure Mental Health Unit at The Canberra Hospital. The unit will provide a new service accommodating patients requiring short-to-medium-term treatment and placement in a secure facility.
At the 2008 election the ACT Labor Party went forward and promised $17.4 million to provide a secure mental health unit. At this stage the government had been talking about it for three years with nothing being done. The announcement was:
This funding will provide for the running of a secure mental health facility from mid 2011.
So there you go with the first delay in terms of when this was going to be projected. So it was going to be up and operational two years ago, so it was already subject to some significant delay.
The government then revealed in 2009 after the election that the facility would be delayed because there was not enough space to co-locate the 15-bed secure unit at the Canberra Hospital site because they got the planning wrong. In the 2011 budget the funding for the facility was removed, so the minister made the decision to take out of the budget as a projected saving the $11.6 million that had been increased to $17 million with the government stating in answer to a question on notice that the project had been put on hold for further analysis. Essentially, that was due to a cost blowout—they got it wrong. They got it wrong when they said that it would go to the
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