Page 3886 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 25 September 2019
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The minister has announced that he is building more cells for the prison in the new 80-bed facility outside the walls, yet he has failed to outline how the facility may accommodate women and in which way it will be designed for women’s best outcomes. What is apparent is that he named the new facility a reintegration centre, while completely and wilfully ignoring the very matters that will affect women’s ability to improve themselves, deal with their personal issues, education and training, and be in the best possible state of mind for the very reintegration that the minister claims to be supporting through the new build.
We speak here often about the need for women who have experienced violence to have appropriate housing, to put their lives together, where the perpetrators cannot find them and where they know that they are safe. It seems to me that the minister does not really care about the rehabilitation or reintegration of women inmates and that he would rather spin a yarn while building the cheapest cells he can get away with for the male detainees, with no plan for how such accommodation would suit, or indeed help, the women. He just could not care less that he, as minister, has failed to provide appropriate accommodation for female detainees in our prison.
The women are catcalled and wolf-whistled. It has been reported to me, as I said, that at least one of them has seen her attacker in a nearby cell block. It is highly likely that there have been more women in the facility at the same time as their perpetrators. This is happening under a minister who comes into this place pretending that he cares about people, their environment and their life outcomes. That is clearly and demonstrably not true.
I would like to see these women have the best chance, when they get out, of having a life that is better than before they went in. There are many different kinds of women in the AMC, and each deserves a women-centred, properly designed environment for their rehabilitation, not the complete mess that this minister has now demonstrated he seems to think is a permanent plan for women in the AMC. I call on the government to properly and genuinely address and plan for a change for these women, to make their accommodation appropriate at the AMC. I commend the motion to the Assembly.
MR RATTENBURY (Kurrajong—Minister for Climate Change and Sustainability, Minister for Corrections and Justice Health, Minister for Justice, Consumer Affairs and Road Safety and Minister for Mental Health) (4.38): I struggle with these sorts of motions that Mrs Jones brings forward because they are a mixture of important and relevant issues and, frankly, personal sledging and colourful interpretations. I will focus on the important issues that have been flagged in Mrs Jones’s motion today. I am very conscious of the need to provide the right services for women incarcerated at the AMC but also to think about how we make sure that those women do not get into the AMC in the first place.
One of the key factors amongst the female detainees is the significant number on remand—well over half. That is why we are focusing on things like providing accommodation specifically for females to avoid them going to the AMC in the first place. There are day-to-day issues, and I will address those in response to the concerns raised by Mrs Jones, but I want to really flag that we are thinking carefully
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