Ms ROSOL (Bass) – Honourable Deputy Speaker, I rise to give the Greens’ response to the Youth Justice Facility Development Bill 2025. I want to begin by centering young people in our minds in this debate. This includes young people in the past who have experienced harmful detention in Ashley Youth Detention Centre, young people who today are detained in a facility that should have closed long ago, and young people who come from extreme disadvantage, including Aboriginal children and children who live with poverty and often significant trauma – children who are effectively punished for being Aboriginal or poor or unsafe.
We have not done well by young people who come into contact with youth justice in Tasmania, and this is well‑documented. There has been untold damage to children over decades. There are stories that have been told and what we have heard is truly terrible. Young people have been abused and their rights have been repeatedly violated. In the middle of that, from the early 2000s, there have been calls for the closure of Ashley Youth Detention Centre.
Later in 2016, a government report recommended the closure of Ashley Youth Detention Centre, and yet it took five years beyond that report for the government to make a single move on closing Ashley. Eventually, in September 2021, the Liberal government announced plans to close Ashley Youth Detention Centre within three years by the end of 2024. That deadline was missed and here we are halfway through 2025 and, still, Ashley Youth Detention Centre remains open.
The government has failed to meet its own commitment to close Ashley. In 2023, the Commission of Inquiry called for the immediate closure of Ashley Youth Detention Centre.
Sitting suspended from 1.00 p.m. to 2.30 p.m.
Resumed from above.
Ms ROSOL – Honourable Deputy Speaker, in 2023, the commission of inquiry called for the immediate closure of Ashley Youth Detention Centre but, rather than take immediate action, the government has quietly adjusted timelines for the closure of Ashley Youth Detention Centre. We found in a Department for Education, Children and Young People (DECYP) annual report that it would be 2026 before it closed. That timeline has now been pushed out until 2027 and, in reality, we are looking at 2028. The government has completely failed to do the necessary work to allow for the closure of Ashley Youth Detention Centre.
We know what that work is. It is laid out in the government’s own Youth Justice Blueprint. The work is to create a holistic therapeutic justice system that focuses on supporting young people and their families where we know there is a risk the young person will become involved in criminal behaviour, and that reduces the drivers of youth crime. The work is to support families with universal interventions that ensure children are safe, housed, well fed and able to engage with education. That means investment in child safety services, housing, cost‑of-living support and education.
The work is to provide diversion programs and interventions, alternative bail facilities that give young people the best opportunity to change their behaviour. That is the real work of Youth Justice: holistic investment that takes into account all aspects of children’s lives and responds to the needs of children with evidence-based interventions that reduce the drivers of crime and help them to change. Instead, we are left with ever-lengthening projections for the closure of Ashley Youth Detention Centre and youth justice reforms being progressed at a snail’s pace.
On top of that, this government is actively working against therapeutic youth justice through their tough‑on-crime mantra and their consideration of actions such as adult crime, adult time, which the Premier this morning confirmed in Question Time remains on the table for consideration by the government.
Punitive responses to youth crimes simply do not work. The outcome of harsh penalties for youth crime are increased recidivism and no change to youth behaviour. While the government claims to be doing the right thing for youth, it is doing the opposite. Its tough‑on-crime policies will only result in more young people in our youth justice facilities.
Here we are today with a half-baked piece of legislation being pushed through with great haste – so much haste that the government has sent through not just one, but two emails this morning, one of them less than an hour before debate was due to commence. I have received copies of public submissions and the government’s responses, two updated second reading speeches and amendments this morning. This is legislation on the fly. Tasmanian young people deserve better.
The reason for this haste is that the government has not done the work it needed to do in the time it needed to do it to close Ashley Youth Detention Centre. This bill gives them something to wave around and point to when they are asked what they are doing to close Ashley. They can claim to be taking action when, in truth, they have moved far too slowly, broken their own promises and let down the young people of Tasmania.
This is a terrible piece of legislation. It rides roughshod over established planning processes, overrides checks and balances, and opens the door to all sorts of planning changes happening without scrutiny. Planning processes are not just red tape designed to hinder development; they are processes established to ensure designs that are safe and appropriate for their purpose. This legislation will not do that. It opens the door to a youth justice facility built without proper process or scrutiny and without transparency.
Right now, we have a master plan. This does not provide the details of the facility design. In fact, the designs for the facility seem to be incomplete at this stage and still under development. Members of this place are being asked to sign off on designs that do not yet exist, or, at the very best, are still being worked out. You only have to look at the amendments distributed this morning to see that design is happening on the fly, with the gross floor area suddenly increased by 2000 square metres.
This legislation is an attempt to hide the government’s inaction on youth justice, but two wrongs do not make a right. A failure to close Ashley Youth Detention Centre cannot be papered over with a faulty piece of legislation.
Interestingly, this bill does not even guarantee a timeframe for the building of a new youth justice facility. For example, in Part 2, clause 6(2)(b), the minister can substitute a new date for the commencement of building the development. Here we have a bill supposedly ensuring the new youth justice facility is hurried along, approvals signed off no matter what, facility built as soon as possible, and Ashley closed sometime, hopefully, eventually, maybe in 2028. However, the minister can change the timeline for the new facility, shift the date and potentially push things further out.
We are being leaned on to show our commitment to the closure of Ashley with a bill that does not even necessarily lead to the closure of Ashley, and certainly not on the timelines the government wants us to think it might follow. There is room in this legislation for it to fail to do what it says it will do. Given the government’s total inability to do what it has said it will do on Ashley Youth Detention Centre, excuse our mistrust of this legislation.
Trust is an important word; it is an important thing and right now trust is low. The commission of inquiry highlighted multiple desperate failures of the government to keep young people safe. It blew the lid off government institutions for all Tasmanians to see the damage done by those institutions, and it laid out a pathway to change, including greater transparency and scrutiny of government services. There lies another significant problem with this bill. It will effectively remove the new facility from scrutiny.
The government claims this is not true because the development process will run its usual course up to the point of a planning decision. We are being asked to vote today on this legislation on trust. We do not have a detailed plan to scrutinise and sign off on. We are being asked to suspend our duty to scrutinise and interrogate a significant development and just sign off on an unknown. We are being asked to legislate powers for the minister to intervene in the planning process at multiple points, allowing plans to be changed along the way without any scrutiny or oversight outside of the department. This bill allows the minister to make up regulations and make changes as he wishes.
We are being asked to sign away community rights to be notified about the development, to comment on it, disagree with it or request additional information. That is on top of the sham consultation process that has also taken away community rights. This bill has not really had proper consultation. It was tabled in this place before the community consultation period even closed, and then we have had a hurried response to submissions shared this morning and amendments on the fly. This is not giving proper consideration to the public submissions, including any concerns they have raised. Rather, this is a heavy-handed approach of blocking community appeals. Has the government considered drawing the community along with them by genuinely engaging with concerns? That would be more likely to produce positive outcomes that allow the youth justice facility to go ahead.
The minister will respond that community members have been invited to two consultation sessions, and they will have an opportunity to make submissions during the development application consideration by Brighton Council. However, any issues community members might raise can be overridden by this legislation. No matter the outcome of the process, the plans have to be approved.
There is also the Public Works Committee when we are thinking about scrutiny. This legislation would withdraw the project from the operation of the Public Works Committee Act, as we see in clause 12, again removing the youth justice facility from parliamentary and public scrutiny.
Transparency, scrutiny, review – every project and government intervention needs it. With this project, of all projects, we see the need for scrutiny and review even more. History has shown us what happens when we do not have scrutiny. Look at Ashley Youth Detention Centre and its terrible, painful, damaging past. We cannot allow this to happen again, but passing this legislation would open the door to that because it removes the project from scrutiny when it allows the minister to make unilateral changes to plans without processes that allow review and feedback. How is that healthy? How is that the best for young people? The potential for secret plans challenges the validity of this whole design process. This legislation opens the door to a youth justice facility built without proper processes and without scrutiny or transparency. How is that in any way appropriate given the history of our state?
There are other contradictions within this bill. The Building Act 2016 says in section 7:
This Act prevails over the provisions of any other Act or any regulation, rule, by‑law, guidelines, planning instrument, standard, condition, determination, or directive, made under any other Act that relates to the design of any building, building work or plumbing work.
However, this bill overrules that. Section 7 of the Building Act 2016 does not apply in respect of the declared project, is what it says in this bill. The Youth Justice Facility Development Bill 2025 suddenly trumps the Building Act 2016.
This government knows that they have failed in taking action on just youth justice. They know they have dropped the ball and are running behind and so they introduce legislation that is heavy‑handed so they can appear to be doing something.
I want to be very clear: there are two issues here and they should not be conflated or confused. First, there is the absolute, inarguable need to close Ashley Youth Detention Centre, something the government has repeatedly failed to do. Then, there are these plans for an alternative youth justice facility that override planning processes and will lead to less scrutiny of the facility.
The Greens remain absolutely committed to doing all we can to ensure Ashley Youth Detention Centre closes as soon as possible. This bill does not do that. It does not ensure Ashley Youth Detention Centre will close. It does not make up for the lack of closure of Ashley Youth Detention Centre. It does not even ensure an alternative facility will start being built later this year.
Two wrongs do not make a right. Failure to close Ashley Youth Detention Centre cannot be corrected by a piece of faulty legislation, that denies natural justice for community members, overrides planning processes, removes planning from public scrutiny, and gives no guarantee of anything concrete except signing off on plans that may or may not otherwise have been approved. It does not even speed things up that much. The Greens cannot support this bill.
I go back to what I said at the beginning of this speech. Ashley Youth Detention Centre needs to close, and a rushed piece of legislation will not make that happen. The real work needs to be investing in Tasmanian children and making sure they have the services and supports they need to live healthy, safe, happy lives. Where children do come into contact with Youth Justice, the work is to make sure there are therapeutic, evidence‑based justice interventions that result in long‑term behaviour change that keeps children out of youth justice facilities.
Whatever we do, we need transparency, scrutiny and as many eyes as possible to make sure we are doing the right thing as a state, and more particularly to make sure that the government are doing the right thing. That is the work we need to be doing. That is what the Greens will keep working for.
