Prisons, Cigarettes and Tobacco

Mr KNOLL (Schubert) (14:54): My question is to the Minister for Correctional Services. Minister, when will South Australia's prisons be smoke-free?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Police, Minister for Correctional Services, Minister for Emergency Services, Minister for Road Safety, Minister Assisting the Minister for Health, Minister Assisting the Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse) (14:54): I thank the member for his question. Members will be aware that there has been a significant amount of work that's happened on this over the past few years, particularly at the Adelaide Remand Centre where there has been a lot of work to make sure that that is a smoke-free facility. That took a significant period of time to implement and to make sure that that was implemented appropriately and safely, particularly for the staff who work there, and that has been a successful project.

I am also advised that in the new unit that is being commissioned at the Adelaide Women's Prison at the moment, the Ruby Unit, that that is being commissioned as a smoke-free unit as well. I personally come from a background of being very concerned about tobacco use in the community generally, and this is obviously something that I am concerned about generally in our prison system. It's something that I have had discussions with the Public Service Association about, and they have particular views about how we could proceed even further and faster in terms of making more of our facilities smoke-free in the future.

We need to do that in a way that's balanced. We need to do that in a way that's well planned and is going to make sure that we have safe and well and secure correctional facilities in the future. That's the process that I am going through at the moment in considering that in both working with the department and talking to the PSA as well. A lot of those solutions are going to involve working on an individual site basis with the staff in terms of looking at what are those individual situations, because obviously we a have very different range of prisons and a very different range of infrastructure in those prisons.

In particular, when you look at what has just happened recently at the Adelaide Women's Prison in terms of the Ruby Unit, that was something that the staff there were very passionate about pushing as part of that new unit, which is a very high standard of prison facility that has been constructed there to make sure that that's a smoke-free facility. We will keep working on this. I understand that this was one of the recommendations that came through from the Legislative Council's report into the prison system yesterday, and we will be considering all those recommendations across government.

A lot of those recommendations we are already acting on. In fact, some of them are represented in things that the house is debating at the moment as well. So we are very keen to work on those recommendations. I dare say that if you read the report that the Legislative Council came out with yesterday, it had nothing like the tenor of what was being described at the beginning of that review process of the Legislative Council when it was a discussion of prisons being in crisis.

All this sort of rhetoric that was said at the beginning, none of that actually came out in the report at the end. There were some sensible recommendations and things that we are very happy to work on, and we will provide a full response to those in due course.