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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-06-13 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

PRISON CONDITIONS

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH (Waite) (15:14): This house should be ashamed of what it has heard today. We have heard a corrections minister and a health minister try to explain away how they condone prisoners being chained to beds in our prisons for up to 20 hours a day (mentally ill prisoners) and why other prisoners (Aboriginal prisoners) are left to their own devices for up to 20 hours a day, in nappies and neglected. This minister should be ashamed of herself. She told the house today that she has known about this since March. It is now well past March. It is June, and what have you done about it? You have known about it for all that time—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH: —and I question—

The SPEAKER: Order!

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH: —and I question before the house whether the minister has in fact known about it for longer than March. I demand that she reveal to the house the full correspondence chain as to when she was told, what she was told and what action she took when she was told, because if we have a corrections minister who thinks that it is alright to leave people chained like animals to beds in our prisons, rather than have them referred to James Nash House where they can be treated clinically by mental health experts, then we live in a state of disgrace.

Not only that, but today we have heard the Minister for Health and the minister for corrections contradict one another in one of the most disgraceful contributions I have heard for a long time. If I heard correctly—and I will check the Hansard—the Minister for Health denied that this patient was mentally ill, but the minister for corrections described her as a psychiatric patient and a psychiatric prisoner.

The Minister for Health does not think there is anything wrong with the mental health of this patient. What world is he living in? And if I heard correctly, he demeaned her and he demeaned our mental health professionals by likening her situation to someone who is acting like a naughty schoolchild in one of the classes he used to teach.

It is a disgusting set of remarks from a health minister who, based on those remarks, should no longer be in the portfolio. They have clearly not been talking to one another from start to finish and they still are not. No wonder these two patients have fallen through the cracks. The health minister thinks the patient does not have any mental problems at all. I just ask any member of this chamber whether, if they were chained like a dog to a bed in a prison cell for 20 hours a day and left in nappies in their own excrement, they would have any mental health issues. I reckon they would.

The fact that the Minister for Health has come in here today and dismissed the whole situation and treated it with flippant irreverence is an absolute disgrace, and for this corrections minister to come in here and admit that she has known about it since March—and I suspect longer; I do not think we have had the truth yet—is a disgrace.

The opposition is calling for a judicial review into this entire matter. Only in that way will we get the truth out of these two very suspect-looking ministers. We want an independent judicial review—a proper inquiry—to examine the failures within both the mental health and the correctional services system that have clearly left these two patients in a disgraceful situation and that have this state and this country looking like some sort of Third World outpost of which we should all be ashamed.

Only a judicial inquiry will tell us whether these two are telling the truth because what I have heard today leads me to suspect that they are not. I want that judicial review to tell South Australians whether the way our patients have been treated—which I must say is like wild animals—breaches any international law or treaty to which Australia is a signatory. I suspect that it does, and doctors agree with me.

It is evident that both these ministers are not up to the job. Their priority is to spend billions of dollars of the taxpayers' money on bricks and mortar in the rail yards constructing a monument to themselves—

The ACTING SPEAKER (Hon. M.J. Wright): The member's time has expired.

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH: —at the expense of front-line services.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Hon. M.J. Wright): Order!

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH: Both of them are a disgrace.

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