Malmsbury Youth Justice Centre
David DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan) (12:35): (288) My question is to the Minister for Youth Justice. Minister, following last night’s serious riot at Malmsbury Youth Justice Centre, which was briefed by your government to the media as a minor incident, how many young people were moved to Cherry Creek?
Enver ERDOGAN (Northern Metropolitan – Minister for Corrections, Minister for Youth Justice, Minister for Victim Support) (12:35): I thank Mr Davis for his question and his interest in this matter. I can confirm to the house that there was an incident at the Malmsbury Youth Justice Centre yesterday, and we are treating that matter very seriously. Violent behaviour of any sort is unacceptable, especially when it affects our staff, young people and the broader community. These kinds of matters are operational matters. We have a very small number of young people in custodial settings in Victoria. That is a result of the work that this government has done – the whole of government, really. Our investments in early childhood, in our education system and in our health system are paying dividends now. We are seeing that. We have much less young people in youth justice settings.
In terms of the amount of people that were transferred across, what I can say is that an orderly transfer did take place last night and those young people were transferred from the Malmsbury facility to the Cherry Creek facility. Because of the small numbers, I am reluctant to share those numbers with Mr Davis in here. It is a very small number, and these are operational matters based on longstanding provisions where the commissioner is in charge of the operation and the transition of people between facilities and the program of facilitating that.
As I have said on the record, by the end of this year there will be no young people at our Malmsbury facility and we will have a system where we will have our Parkville precinct and our Cherry Creek facility in place. But what I can say is that the transfer of those young people was successful yesterday evening.
David DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan) (12:37): It was a very, very simple question and you should have answered it.
A member: He did.
David DAVIS: He did not. He did not give us a number, and none of us accept –
Jaclyn Symes: He told you why he shouldn’t, which is an answer.
David DAVIS: A claim, at least.
Enver Erdogan: Very small numbers were successfully transferred.
David DAVIS: No-one believes that. You could have just provided the number. Minister, I ask: can you give a guarantee that staff and inmates at Cherry Creek will be safe given the lack of experienced staff currently at Cherry Creek and the sudden transfer of inmates overnight?
Enver ERDOGAN (Northern Metropolitan – Minister for Corrections, Minister for Youth Justice, Minister for Victim Support) (12:38): I thank Mr Davis for his supplementary question. What I will do is just express my gratitude to our youth justice workers, who do tremendous work – they are experienced, hardworking, dedicated staff – instead of talking them down. They are very experienced. The people that work in our youth justice system are highly trained specialists. Many have a wide range of experiences not just in our youth justice system, whether it be in social work or whether it be in broader law enforcement – in a whole range of sectors. Instead of talking them down, I would say that they do amazing work. They are experts in their field, as we saw with the incident yesterday. I understand that our safety and response team responded. From all accounts they did an amazing job in containing the incident. Our staff are well trained. I really do take offence at your inference that they are not appropriately trained and do not know their roles. They are very well dedicated, and we will be supporting them. What I do guarantee to everyone here is that we will continue to support our youth justice staff. We guarantee that we will continue to support them and provide greater funding to our youth justice system.