Ms ROSOL (Bass) – Honourable Speaker, I move –
That the House take note of the following matter: safety of children.
I want to speak particularly about the safety of children detained in Tasmanian adult prison watch houses. In June last year, the Custodial Inspector released the children in Tasmania’s prisons review report. In it, the inspector reported that 222 children were held in the Hobart and Launceston reception prison watch houses 642 times over a 21‑month period. Children as young as 11 were included in these figures and around 10 per cent were under 14 years of age. According to the Custodial Inspector, most spent significant time in the watch houses, with children waiting for transfer to Ashley Youth Detention Centre held the longest.
Unions have reported some detail about what children are exposed to in prison watch houses, including being held next to adults who are drunk, high and suicidal. They are exposed to assaults and have had threats made against them. When Prof Neil Morgan visited the Hobart reception prison watch house in 2024, he said, ‘it was one of the most confronting things I’ve encountered in a place of child custody. The sense of stress, distress and dysfunction will stay with me for a long time.'[Quote checked – Custodial Inspector’s report Children in Prisons 2025] The Custodial Inspector has stated that prison watch houses are wholly inappropriate for children and called on the government to stop their use.
During budget Estimates, I asked the Minister for Children and Youth how many children were held in adult prison watch houses between 1 July 2025 and 3 June 2026. She did not know. The minister told me that prison watch houses were not in her portfolio area, so she did not know how many children had been held in them, and there was no current process for routinely sharing that information between relevant departments. I was completely shocked by this answer. Children in contact with youth justice are the responsibility of the Minister for Children and Youth, yet she did not know how many were exposed to the horrific conditions in prison watch houses. It seems that, for the Minister for Children and Youth, once children enter the doors of an adult prison, they cease to be relevant to her.
Yesterday, when questioned by the honourable member for Hobart, Cassy O’Connor, the minister continued to stress that she could not be held responsible for children in prison watch houses because they weren’t in her portfolio area, and besides, her attention is squarely focused on diversion and keeping children out of detention. Deputy Speaker, that’s an admirable focus and important work that the Greens support. However, the Greens have a recent RTI that shows 306 children were held in prison watch houses in the financial year 2025‑26. Some of those children are as young as 12 or 13 years old. Worse, the longest time a child was held was for 55 hours. So, while the Minister for Children and Youth says she is working to keep children out of detention, the numbers being held in prison watch houses remain terribly high, and yet the minister cannot detail any steps she has taken to find alternatives to prison watch houses. Visiting the reception prison in Launceston, as she says she has, is not fixing the problem.
The Custodial Inspector was clear: children should not be in prison watch houses, and the government must make a plan and develop alternatives to get them out of there. That sounds like work for the Minister for Children and Youth in her role as minister responsible for youth justice, and yet she is not doing the work, she’s not driving the work, and not doing everything she can to create alternatives in tandem with the Minister for Justice, Corrections and Rehabilitation. The Minister for Children and Youth and the Minister for Justice, Corrections and Rehabilitation can say they take this matter seriously all they like, but unless they are taking tangible action to stop children being held in prison watch houses, their words don’t count for anything. Every day they say they care, while they still cannot outline concrete actions they have taken to create solutions to children in prison watch houses, is a day of failure to keep Tasmanian children safe.
Prison watch houses are not safe for children. That’s it. Stop using them. Make it an urgent priority to find alternatives. We must not allow children to be harmed while in the care or custody of the state. We spent a whole commission of inquiry examining Tasmania’s sorry history of this. Children in prison watch houses cannot be a hidden pocket where state-sanctioned damage to children is still allowed. The government must take action to stop children being held in prison watch houses, and they must start acting now.
