Thursday, 21 March 2024

Ministers statements: corrections system

Enver ERDOGAN (Northern Metropolitan – Minister for Corrections, Minister for Youth Justice, Minister for Victim Support) (12:12): I rise as Minister for Corrections to update the house about the progress of reforms underway in response to the cultural review of the adult custodial corrections system as we near the one-year anniversary of its release. Our government is committed to a safer, more modern corrections system. Corrections Victoria staff work hard every day to maintain and improve our correctional facilities and make all Victorians safer. We are committed to ensuring that our staff have the skills and tools they need to keep the system safe and provide the opportunity for people to get their lives back on track. Breaking the cycle of reoffending is the key to improving community safety. From the outset I was clear that delivering lasting system-wide cultural change would take a sustained commitment over many years.

In the last 12 months we have made good progress. We have initiated or completed a number of key reforms already. Let me just highlight a few of these reforms. We have new primary health care providers operating at all public prisons, including new public health providers in our women’s system. We are recruiting more Aboriginal wellbeing officers to better support Aboriginal people in custody, and we opened our new Aboriginal healing unit at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre in September last year. A new complaints-handling process is being developed to better support our staff. And there is more to come: a key focus for this year is developing a new workforce strategy in consultation with corrections staff that will guide improvements to recruitment, training and retention for many years to come. We are committed to working with corrections staff and key stakeholders to drive lasting improvements. I want to say thank you to key stakeholders for their role to date in informing and planning the implementation of these reforms and for our shared commitment to transforming our corrections system for the better.