Page 5307 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 29 November 2017
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I can inform the Assembly that the move of female detainees took place yesterday. All of the women have now been moved, and it was completed by mid-afternoon yesterday. I have been briefed that the process went very smoothly. There is considerable support being provided to the women as they settle into their new accommodation, both from Health staff and from staff from Winnunga. I would particularly like to thank Winnunga for their support in assisting with that transition process. It is not easy for people to move around a centre like that, but through a careful planning process by Corrective Services staff over a number of months and consultation with detainees, with staff and with external oversight agencies, we have managed to put in place a good medium-term solution and also execute the plan smoothly, as one would hope.
There are a number of other areas that I am very positive about that have improved in the AMC in recent years, including continuous efforts to bring new programs and ideas into the programs area, and of course the success of the through-care program. All in all, corrections does continue to be a challenging environment. Unfortunately, we have people in our system who will seek to take drugs and people who will seek to resolve their differences through violence. This is the environment that we operate in. It is one where we must seek to put in place systems to prevent those sorts of things taking place. I know that our Corrective Services staff are very dedicated to doing that. After five years in the role, I remain as passionate as I was on the first day to continue to improve things at the AMC.
The AMC was built with shortcomings. Over the last five years we have worked incredibly hard to turn some of those shortcomings around—building new accommodation, building prison industries and putting in place a series of steps to make this a world-class corrections facility.
MRS JONES (Murrumbidgee) (6.21): In closing, I thank the minister for his contribution. I want to make a couple of quick comments based on the information given in his speech. The first one is that I am pleased to see that new detainees are being separated to give them time to settle in. I think it is a shame that it took a death to get to that point. I am really pleased to hear about the decrease in assaults. That is a very positive number. It is sad that we were well above the average beforehand, but I accept that some work has been done there and obviously there has been some success.
I note the minister’s commitment to industry programs, but I repeat the statistic that about 51 per cent of the men and about 61 per cent of the women are not engaged in any of these things, and, as a result, are prone to boredom. That is something that we would like to see change.
On the matter of the KPMG report on the anomaly in the financial system, I do not accept everything that I read in the paper, and I am glad that the minister has brought some details here. Perhaps I could seek a briefing to have a bit more understanding of that matter, because I do not think we have got to the heart today of what actually happened and how it was resolved. And I understand that there may be sensitivities around it. On that closing note, we do not support the amendment, but we hope that next year will be a better year for corrections.
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