Page 4752 - Week 13 - Thursday, 28 November 2019
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MR GUPTA: Chief Minister, how will the new CIT Woden campus contribute to the renewal of the Woden town centre?
MR BARR: As I have mentioned, the new campus in the town centre will be a hub for significant collaboration with industry, business, students and the broader community, driving a culture of innovation centred in the town centre. There will be 6,500 thousand students and hundreds of staff. This will have a particularly positive impact on daytime and evening trade for businesses in the town centre.
This new CIT campus is just one part of a very significant range of both public and private sector investments in the town centre and the immediate surrounds that will drive renewal, open up a range of opportunities for the community and, particularly through this new campus, for CIT students, staff and local businesses.
Woden is a major community and commercial precinct for the southern part of the city, and it is attracting more people to live there, work there, socialise there and now to study in the town centre in the 2020s. CIT Woden will contribute significantly to that bigger picture plan for the Woden town centre.
Alexander Maconochie Centre—human rights
MR PARTON: My question is to the minister for corrections. When the AMC was built it was to be Australia's first and only human rights compliant prison. Why does the ACT prison system have the worst standard of human rights in Australia?
MR RATTENBURY: That is a very interesting question because when the AMC was opened and people made those sorts of claims, no-one ever really defined what they meant by a human rights compliant jail. No-one spelt it out. What we have done this term is undertake a process of consultation to publish a set of human rights standards for the jail so that we can be clear with our own staff and our community about what we expect those standards to be and against which we can also be judged externally. We have created a benchmark against which we can start to say: how does this jail measures up? Similarly, we have created the position of Inspector of Correctional Services to give us judgement on those matters.
Mr Parton has made a claim. I do not share his view. I think the AMC strives very hard to comply with human rights, and we have a range of oversight agencies to ensure that we live up to those standards as best as possible.
MR PARTON: Minister, why does the ACT have the most expensive prison system on a per capita basis, given that the services are so limited?
MR RATTENBURY: That number per capita has been coming down significantly in recent years. It relates to the way the calculations are done in the report on government services, which includes a degree of capital component cost. It is, of course, as is the case with quite a number of circumstances in the ACT, a feature of being a relatively small jurisdiction.
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