Page 3622 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 22 October 2013
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Mr Rattenbury: You’re an angry man, Mr Hanson.
MR HANSON: I am an angry man. Mr Rattenbury interjects that I am an angry man, and I am an angry man. I will tell you why. It is not just for the reasons I have outlined. One of the solutions that we had in the first place was not to build this jail at all but to spend that $140 million—now it is going to be $150 million, $160 million or $170 million—on our health system and we could keep the prisoners in New South Wales. I was attacked by Mr Rattenbury. I was attacked by Mr Stanhope. I was attacked by everybody from the left side of politics for daring to say that we could have our prisoners in New South Wales—I remember it distinctly—and that I was uncaring.
What we see now is that Mr Rattenbury from the Greens—it may not have been you directly, Mr Rattenbury, but it certainly would have been Ms Bresnan, your Greens’ spokesperson for corrections—
Mr Rattenbury: Just make it up, Jeremy. Just make it up. Say whatever you like. Make it up. Go on.
MR HANSON: You are getting angry now, aren’t you? You have been making up your whole statement. It is a farce; it is hypocrisy. What are we seeing now from the left of politics, the progressive left that sneered at the Canberra Liberals for daring to suggest that New South Wales was the solution? I can find you the quotes—and I will, Mr Rattenbury; I will come back into this place and I will read them to you—no doubt from your colleague Ms Bresnan and from Simon Corbell and John Hargreaves, and hopefully we can find some from others. We now find that the problem that we predicted, the problem that we said was apparent and that we warned this government about, has come home to roost and the sneering seems to have stopped. The only thing the government has come up with in response, other than having a roundtable, appears to be, “Let’s look at sending prisoners back to New South Wales,” having sneered at the opposition for having said that for years.
The government have got themselves into a position that is appalling. They have spent tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money above and beyond what was promised. They have delivered a jail that was at capacity the day it opened. It is bursting at the seams. It is causing a situation where the jail is impossible to operate optimally. It is causing a situation where prisoners and corrections officers are put in a very difficult position. I have great sympathy for our very professional Corrective Services who bear the brunt of this. Whilst corrections officers were warning of this—and I know, because I got correspondence from corrections officers—and telling me that they were being put in an impossibly dangerous situation, the government ignored it. All that was happening from the Greens, from Mr Rattenbury and his colleagues, was to ignore that and to say, “We are going to put needles in the jail.” That is all we heard from them.
A minister who has ignored this subject for so long and has allowed this situation to develop when we warned against it is now making statements that are dripping with hypocrisy and rewriting history. I think that demonstrates to all and sundry why this
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