Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, it is a great pleasure to be here in the Chamber today to take some actions in response to some long-held concerns from our independent statutory officer, the Custodial Inspector. I reiterate what the member for Bass, Cecily Rosol, who is taking carriage of this bill for the Greens today, has said about the Custodial Inspector. The work that he does is incredibly important, incredibly underfunded relative to the gravity of his role, and a huge plethora of duties that he is responsible for that is manifestly on the public record and has been stated by many people other than and including the Greens. The Custodial Inspector’s work is critical.
Minister, I personally could not make any sense of your arguments because you did not address any of the reasons that Ms Rosol gave for why this bill is coming today. I believe it is a little bit rich talking as though it is inappropriate to use the term ‘reprisals’ when that is the reason that we are here today; because the independent statutory authority, the Custodial Inspector, has used that term himself. That is why we are here today. It is obviously the appropriate term and I hope that the minister would respect the advice and the information that has been provided by the custodial inspector because he is the one who parliament has tasked with doing these independent inspections.
Ms Ogilvie made the comment, ‘The Greens see more laws as the answer,’ as though there is something wrong with more laws. Here we are in the Parliament of Tasmania and, in case of students who are leaving who do not know, we are here to make laws. That is our job: to make laws. If the government is going to stop making laws, well, that is going to be a very interesting change of precedent in the Westminster system because we have only four bills that are listed, I believe. That is not a lot happening, from the government’s point of view, but there you go, I guess they are not making laws anymore. The Greens will be making laws. It is not even a new act.
We are amending an act and we are making it better from information that was provided by the independent statutory authority, the custodial inspector – a person who has been stoically representing people who do not have a voice and speaking on their behalf and making those same comments for years now.
For the benefit of anyone who is watching, and particularly for Ms Ogilvie, I would like to go through what our recent history was when we had a Greens correction minister 11 years ago now, and reflect on the changes that we have seen over the past 11 years under this Liberal government’s approach to corrections, to rehabilitation, to managing crime in the community.
What happened under minister Nick McKim at the time, who had the Corrections portfolio, was a dramatic reversal in the culture for the Risdon Prison complex in particular. He went through a huge cultural change process which was not without its controversy and not without its difficulty. At the end of four years, what that resulted in was a demonstrated dramatic reversal in crimes in prison and recidivism, and those two measures are the most critical for anyone who ought to be concerned about how prisons get managed in Tasmania because recidivism, the number of times that people who leave prison are returned to prison because they create a crime, is a direct indication of how effective prisons are in rehabilitating and undertaking restorative justice.
What we saw under a Greens Corrections minister in the Labor‑Greens government was a big a reduction in recidivism and what we have seen in the 11 years since the Liberals have been in government is a huge increase in recidivism. In other words, people are leaving prison and many more times than they were under a Greens Corrections minister, they are returning to prison not because it is a holiday house, but because they have created a crime. That demonstrates a failure of the system under the Liberals to put in place the programs that inmates need while they are in prison and when they leave prison, to make sure that they have every opportunity, every ability, to not return to a life of crime.
One of the first things that the Liberals did when they came to government, I think it was in 2015 or 2016, is they took away the funding from the RIO program, the reintegration of ex‑offenders program which was an incredibly successful program. It only cost $260 million a year. They quantified that it saved $1 million a year and what it did was it helped people –
Mr Bayley – $260,000 a year?
Dr WOODRUFF – $260,000 a year and it saved $1 million a year. More to the point, by the time the program has been running for a couple of years, they had zero per cent reoffending from people who went through that program and that is outstanding. The reason it worked was because there was money put into helping people when they left prison, get them jobs, reintegrate with their family, get involved in the community, in volunteering, have housing and have the sorts of things that people need to help them to break the patterns of crime and make sure that they do not repeat crimes and go back into prison.
The other thing that we have seen in the 11 years that the Liberals have been in government is a reversal of the trends that occurred downwards under a Greens minister in the Labor-Greens government, of assaults in prisons. Assaults in prisons were very high and what we saw was a sharp decline, after the cultural change in the prisons, of assaults from staff to prisoners, from prisoners to staff and from prisoners to prisoners. All of those were going down. Ever since the Liberals have been in government with a pause of a couple of years ‑ Vanessa Goodwin was an excellent Corrections minister – those numbers have been going up. They have been going up and up every year. The prison is a more dangerous place. It is a more dangerous place for inmates and it is a more dangerous place for staff. Custodial officers are exposed to a more dangerous place, as are prisoners, than they were 11 years ago under this Liberal government’s mismanagement, their approach and underfunding of the prisons.
The other thing that has gone away year-on-year has been support for people for to be involved in therapeutic programs to deal with drug addiction and people go into prison so often because of addiction to drugs and stealing and other minor crimes or maybe not-so-minor crimes that are a result in part because of an addiction to drugs. This is the sort of work that was being funded and prisoners were being helped to get off the harmful use of drugs. The funding for that has gone down, as has the funding for literacy programs. Another incredibly important part of a person leaving prison and changing their life is to have access to an education program in the prison and specifically hands-on person-to-person, adult-specific literacy education that is personalised to each person, is a highly skilled, very important part of what used to be offered for people in prisons and now if it is there, it is certainly not being offered to the same quality that it was – no disrespect at all for the people who are working to do that work, it is just that they should have a lot more support, minister, because I know that they are doing it very tough, doing the best that they can with a tiny amount of money that is available to do that really important work.
The point I wanted to make is that overcrowding in prisons has gone up steeply under the Liberals. I do not have the figures to hand, perhaps the minister could tell us if she had that information available to her, perhaps if we go into committee, what are the numbers of people in the Risdon Prison complex at the moment, because I certainly remember in 2015, when I was the Corrections –
Ms Ogilvie – It is all in Estimates, I gave it to you.
The SPEAKER – First, the minister will not interject, and second, the questions in committee will go to the member who has moved the bill and not the minister.
Dr WOODRUFF – Thank you, Speaker. I remember, when I was the corrections shadow before Ms Rosol, that the figures that we had at the time were 470 people in RPC. A couple of years later they went up to 550 people. I remember hearing that they were well over that, well north of that, the last time I heard, but whatever the number is today, we can be very confident that our prisons in Tasmania over a decade of the Liberals’ ‘tough on crime’ approach and coupled with an under-resourcing of the prison system, rehabilitation and restorative justice, has meant that our prisons are bursting at the seams and that obviously has a huge impact for the wellbeing and the care of inmates and it obviously has huge impact on the staff.
The other thing that went down under the Greens minister from 2010 to 2014 was the amount of sick leave and stress leave that staff were taking in the prisons, again, that has skyrocketed under the Liberals and is another bit of information that is relevant to this bill. These are the circumstances that the Custodial Inspector is experiencing when he goes into the prison to do an inspection and what he is there to do, of course, is to look at the standards, to look at the specific wellbeing, the care, the rehabilitation and the safety of prisoners and also to hear the stories of staff. In this context, we believe the Custodial Inspector when he says that there needs to be protections against reprisals for people who want to speak to him because there is no doubt the evidence he has provided that people have felt a chilling effect in being able to speak up.
When the minister said earlier that she would prefer not to legislate on these matters, but she would prefer to work with cooperation and trust. I say, how about you work with listening and believing? That would be a really good start. Do not tell people to have trust in you. You have to earn trust and the evidence from the custodial inspector is that the Liberals have not earned the trust of the people in prisons, who are the custodial staff or the inmates, because they are his words, they feel that they need protections in order to be able to speak freely.
This bill is a very important contribution to Tasmania’s whistleblower protection laws. It will provide the safeguards for people who want to speak freely and who want to speak to a person who has not been given a sanitised prison space to go into. Another very important part of this bill, a small part of this bill is it will enable the custodial inspector to make unannounced inspections without having everything tidied away and organised. He should be able to, in his role, see for himself the circumstances that people are incarcerated in. He should be able to see how many staff are on for the day. He should be able to understand what their experiences are and reflect on that and provide an informed report.
On behalf of the Greens, I want to thank Labor for their support. I am not surprised, and I am pleased to hear, that Labor is supporting this legislation. We believe it will make a real and sustained difference to people who are living in or working in our prisons. We certainly hope that the work of the custodial inspector and what he brings to light in his reports will in some way encourage or direct ‑ whatever is required ‑ the government to put more funding into restorative justice and rehabilitation.
It is not just good for the welfare of people who are housed and who call those places their home while they are incarcerated there, it is good for the community to have lower rates of reoffending when people leave prison. It is also better for inmates’ families, because they will go back into the community with better literacy, with a better ability to manage drug use, and with more potential to be able to get a job and be reincorporated into the community.
