Page 193 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 14 December 2016

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(d) industry placements for job training are extremely limited at present; and

(3) calls on the Government to:

(a) collate the recommendations of all the abovementioned reports and publish a list of all recommendations detailing those recommendations which have:

(i) been undertaken and completed;

(ii) commenced being worked upon; and

(iii) not yet been acted upon; and

(b) report this information annually to the Assembly via the Justice and Community Safety Committee.

I am really pleased today to speak to the motion on the notice paper in my name calling for a consolidation and regular reporting into unending issues at the Alexander Maconochie Centre, otherwise known as our prison. As the new shadow minister in this area I have a range of concerns to start off with about the operation of the facility and what is being achieved there. I also have some concerns about the safety and wellbeing of the prison population as well as staff, and the number of serious security breaches that are starting to concern members of the community who rightly have high expectations of this facility.

Over the past eight years, since the prison’s “glorious” opening, we have heard from the minister that, despite plans for it to be a groundbreaking facility—and there were very high hopes, I am sure, amongst many for respecting of rights of detainees as well as the outcomes for them and for their families—the centre has been beset by some issues. I am concerned that the government has had lots of opportunities to address safety and security as well as other issues at the prison but has not seemed to have achieved the whole work yet.

Firstly, let us look at some of the security concerns that have made their way into the media and that have become public. In 2015 there were a range of breaches with inmates who had managed to smuggle mobile phones into the prison and used the mobile phones to post selfies on Facebook. Inmates also used the mobile phones to film a fight between other inmates that was then uploaded onto social media.

This is concerning on various levels: the fact that there were phones; the fact that there was unrestricted access to the internet; the fact that there was a fight; the fact the fight was filmed; the fact that the film was uploaded to social media. Each of these issues is a serious security concern and need to be addressed. It must be asked: once the fight was on social media, what span did it have, who viewed it, what was the impact of it and was the footage removed? It is a serious issue.

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