Page 4356 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 27 November 2013
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For anyone who visited that centre and saw people being remanded there, if it was any one of our families, any one of our children that was spending time in that place, you would have fought long and hard to have a more appropriate facility constructed in the ACT so that people could go and visit, in an appropriate environment, their loved one who was spending time in custody.
That is the history of this project. The Labor government is guilty of fighting for the rights of those people who were being sent interstate. My involvement with this goes back way beyond that. My father used to be an advocate for prisoner families who were transferred to New South Wales. He used to come home and tell me the stories of the families he worked with. Many of them were disadvantaged families, families that had multiple problems going on. He would have to go and arrange transport and funding for them to have even one visit with their loved one in New South Wales.
Yes, we were guilty of saying we wanted to have our own jail. We then had to fight against some political response which argued against having the AMC. There was a whole range of arguments about the Hilton at Jerrabomberra and how luxurious and over the top it was, and that it was going to be all about human rights. We had to argue against and defend that, to ensure that it was built to a suitable standard. The Canberra Liberals, at every opportunity, have criticised this facility, have sought to make political hay with any issue that goes on—and there will be multiple issues that continue to go on in a jail; that is the nature of the business.
But we have a facility now. It is housing more people than we had expected and what had been predicted on a range of different modelling that was presented to the cabinet. The cabinet did have to take some decisions about scope and size at the point in time when we were getting updates about the budget. There were different projections that were presented to the cabinet. There were low-end projections and there were high-end projections from Treasury, and there was analysis done in 2002 and an updated analysis that came through after that.
When you look at this rationally, I think Mr Hanson said the jail was full when it opened, and that is not true. In 2009 there were 154 prisoners. It was actually less than what had been expected by some of the Treasury projections. So that is not true. It then tracked, until 2011, pretty well against the Treasury projections. It was not until 2012, and certainly in the last 10 months with a 40 per cent increase in numbers in the jail, that we saw the population exceed the Treasury projections that had been provided to the cabinet and that ultimately had informed some of the decision making we took about keeping the jail within the approved budget.
That is the reality. There has been a significant change in the last 10 months and the government has had to deal with that. I would say, from my discussions with other first ministers, that this is not something unique to the ACT. In other jurisdictions they are under even more pressure than we are with our jail, as they are looking for other accommodation options for people who have been sentenced or held on remand. So this is not unique to the ACT. All jurisdictions are seeking to find ways of managing increasing prisoner populations.
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