Thursday, 31 July 2025

 Enver ERDOGAN (Northern Metropolitan – Minister for Casino, Gaming and Liquor Regulation, Minister for Corrections, Minister for Youth Justice) (12:15): I rise today to inform the house of a major milestone in our Victorian corrections system. A year ago I announced that we would commission the Western Plains Correctional Centre and have it open by the middle of 2025. I am proud to report that is a commitment made and a commitment delivered.

Last month I had the privilege of officially opening the Western Plains correctional facility in Lara. This correctional facility is equipped with state-of-the art security and barrier control systems, including AI-supported facial recognition, CCTV and movement systems. We invested in this new publicly operated maximum-security prison because we as a government are a government of builders, not blockers. We are setting up the critical infrastructure this state needs today and long into the future. The facility significantly bolsters our prison capacity, increasing both our maximum-security and remand bed count. Commissioning the state-of-the art correctional centre has been no small task. We have recruited hundreds of new staff, from corrections officers to clinicians and from facilities to program staff, as well as redeploying experienced staff from other parts of the corrections system. Corrections Victoria are now placing prisoners at Western Plains in an ongoing process, and that will continue to ramp up over the coming months. It will hold up to 1000 prisoners by the end of this year.

Opening this correctional centre is the next major step forward in the Allan Labor government’s modernisation of Victoria’s corrections system. I want to give my sincere thanks to everyone at the Western Plains correctional facility and Corrections Victoria for the enormous effort in commissioning this new prison, and I particularly want to thank the communities that host a lot of our custodial settings but especially those in the Greater Geelong region, where Western Plains is located, for their ongoing support of our corrections system. We as a government will always prioritise investments in community safety.