Jail break

A tiny community in northern Tasmania is fiercely divided about the State Government’s plan to build a prison in their neighbourhood

The Meander Valley town of Westbury was bypassed by the Bass Highway nearly 20 years ago, so the town’s main road is not as busy as it once was but it has retained a lot of its pretty village charm and it is still very much on the tourist route. Anyone in town will tell you how hard the place has worked to keep itself alive since being bypassed by the main highway in the region. And with a dense cluster of antique shops, a steam engine museum and a traditional hedge maze, Westbury has certainly done a good job of keeping itself appealing to tourists despite that considerable setback.

But the recent announcement that the town, 30km west of Launceston, is the preferred location for a new Northern Regional Prison has sent many townspeople into a panic, fearing their hard-won tourist appeal will evaporate when the sixmetre-high prison walls go up.

The issue of the prison’s location has been a source of debate in State Parliament as well, with the Labor Opposition attacking the Government this week for promising to listen to residents, and then pushing on with the proposal anyway, despite the heavy opposition shown by the Westbury community.

Opposition Leader Rebecca White called on the Government to publicly release the full list of possible prison sites under consideration, but the Government is refusing to do so.

Valley Central Industrial Precinct is just out of sight of the township, on the opposite side of the Bass Highway and shielded from view of the town by a little ridge of a hill to Westbury’s north. It hosts a number of big manufacturing and industrial businesses, including poppy processor Tasmanian Alkaloids, the Ridley fish pellet factory, and Tasbuilt prefabricated homes.

Less than 2km from the Westbury town centre, this will be the location of the new prison if everything goes according to plan for the State Government. And while it remains essentially invisible from the town, it will be very visible from the highway near the Westbury turn-off and locals fear this could be enough to discourage tourists from making that turn to visit the town.

Battlelines have been drawn since the official announcement was made on September 30 that Westbury had been selected as the State Government’s preferred site for a $270 million Northern Regional Prison. The announcement came as a shock to Westbury residents who, until that time, had no idea they were even on the short list.

Suddenly they were seeing glossy pamphlets in their letter boxes announcing the news and promising community consultation would follow, prompting many to ask: what sort of community consultation comes after an announcement has already been made? Even members of the Meander Valley Council were taken by surprise by the announcement.

Communications failures aside, opposition to the idea came from more quarters than just the annoyed Westbury residents. Some, including the Salvation Army and Greens justice spokeswoman Rosalie Woodruff, have said the $270 million would be better spent on crime prevention and anti-recidivism projects, aiming to keep people out of prison, rather than building more space to house more inmates.

And with a timeline showing the prison is expected to be completed by 2029, Community and Public Sector Union secretary Tom Lynch said it was simply too long to wait for a solution to Tasmania’s long-running prison “crisis”.

One thing everyone seems to agree on is the project is almost certain to go ahead with or without the support of the Westbury community. Some in the town are choosing to find ways to take advantage of having a prison in their backyard, but many others are gearing up to fight tooth-and-nail to stop the Government’s plans. And judging by the hundreds who last weekend attended the first of what will undoubtedly be many rallies against the prison, the Government might have underestimated the backlash.

Let’s face it, nobody would be particularly happy to discover a prison was going to be built in their town or suburb, but with prison populations growing nationwide, including in Tasmania, it is no great secret that Risdon Prison in the state’s South is rapidly becoming too small to keep up.

So, with almost half of Tasmania’s prisoner population coming from the North, the idea of a northern prison has been kicked around for years as a solution. The Liberal State Government made a $350 million election promise to fix and help ease pressure on the state’s ageing prison infrastructure and Corrections Minister Elise Archer says the proposed Northern Regional Prison forms a key part of this promise.

Stage one of the prison is planned to be completed by 2024 and will house 140 prisoners, and the prison is expected to be fully functional by 2029, employing about 250 staff once complete and hundreds in construction. The prison will be built to maximum security specifications but will also house a remand section and accommodations for all classes of prisoner, male and female, minimum to maximum security, with 6m perimeter walls.

Archer has pitched the proposal to Westbury residents in terms of the hundreds of permanent jobs it is expected to create and the economic boost it could deliver to the region.

“We anticipate it will result in a range of broad benefits for the region including job creation, investment, the stimulation of

local businesses across the board, improved public transportation and other services — all on an ongoing basis,” she says. But Westbury is not convinced.

Prisoners Legal Service chairman and long time prisoners’ rights advocate Greg Barns says opposition from Westbury residents is to be expected but that their fears are unfounded.

“Nobody ever wants a prison next door but, ironically, whenever a prison closes down in an area, it is the locals who are the first to complain about it because of the loss of employment,” he says. “In Brewarrina in western NSW the Government is about to close down the local prison and the community is up in arms over it. They didn’t want it to begin with but now they don’t want it to go.”

Brewarrina’s Yetta Dhinnakkal Centre opened in 2000 as a minimum security prison exclusively for young Aboriginal men and has no walls or fences. Inmates are referred to as “trainees” and are taught farming skills as part of their rehabilitation, which also focuses on keeping prisoners in close contact with family.

The program has been successful but the cost of operating the facility is deemed too high and the NSW Government announced recently that it will be closed next year. The droughtaffected Brewarrina community has come to rely on the prison as an economic driver, from food and service industries to local accommodation which caters to visiting family members.

But some Westbury locals fear the opposite will be true of their tiny historic village, which relies heavily on visitors stopping in while driving the tourist route from Devonport through to Launceston and beyond. Hayley Brazendale, owner of The Green Door Cafe, fears her business will decline if the prison is built. “About 80 per cent of my customers are tourists and they’re all horrified when I tell them there’s going to be a prison built here,” she says. “What is that going to do to the image of this town? Who is going to want to come here?”

Eve Robson, from Once Upon a Time Collectables, says people in town are losing sleep worrying about the prison and when a resident entered her shop in tears recently, she knew exactly why, and soon they were both crying together as they discussed the issue. “What people are fighting for here is their way of life, and once you attach that stigma to a town like this, we will never shake it,” she says. “We have only been in Tasmania for about 18 months, we moved here from Sydney and had a choice of buying anywhere in Tassie, but we picked Westbury because of the heritage, history, the atmosphere of the village, and the lovely people who live here. Had there been a prison here at the time, we wouldn’t have bought anywhere near the place.”

Westbury resident of about 40 years Heather Donaldson says the prison would be the death knell for the town, which has already had to work hard to overcome other obstacles like the Bass Highway bypass. She says the prison will be a huge deterrent for tourism. “Where they’re planning to build it is going to be clearly visible from the highway and sits right near the turnoff to Westbury as you’re driving down from Devonport,” she says. “So if you’re a tourist just off the ferry, and you’re thinking of stopping in at Westbury because you’ve heard how lovely it is, are you still going to take that turn-off when you see a great big prison sitting there? People will just drive past.”

Donaldson and husband Chris have raised their four children at Westbury but she says they will move if the prison is built. “I couldn’t stay here, I don’t want to live in a prison town. Nobody is against having a northern prison somewhere, but it shouldn’t be so close to the doorstep of one of Tassie’s most beautiful historic tourist towns. If they had announced a prison was going to be built less than 2km from the town centre of Bicheno or Richmond, the entire state would be screaming about it. Sure it has to go somewhere but it shouldn’t be up to the people of Westbury to have that argument and suggest better alternatives, there’s heaps of highly paid bureaucrats in Hobart whose job it is to think about that.”

As intense as the debate has become, it is worth remembering that Westbury is still officially only the state’s preferred location for the prison, and nothing is set in stone just yet, which gives some relief to the Meander Valley Council’s embattled mayor Wayne Johnston.

Johnston says the council has “copped a flogging” from many locals about the prison proposal but he maintains he was just as surprised as everyone else when the announcement was made.

“There’s all these conspiracy theories floating around about the council being in on it with the State Government but it simply isn’t the case,” he says. “All the discussions between the Government and the current landowners have been commercial -in-confidence and we haven’t been privy to any of that. Ten possible sites were identified across the North of the state and until that announcement was made on September 30 we didn’t know we were being seriously considered. If I had been doing it [handling the State Government’s public communications] I can definitely say I would have handled it very differently.”

Ultimately the council has final planning authority on any project being built in its municipality, even one as big as the prison, so Johnston made it clear the council would be doing as much research and examining as much information as possible before making a decision.

“The state has said they will go through all the normal planning procedures as if they were any other land owner. Under the regular planning scheme there is ample opportunity for people to make submissions for or against it and we have to take those views into account. So it’s not really a given yet that they can just go ahead, potentially people could still stop this.

“But the State Government still has the option of classifying this as a Project of State Significance or Regional Significance, which would allow them to essentially override all of that and build it anyway. They haven’t done that yet but that legislation has sat there for 10 years and has never been used yet, so it’s possible.”

Talking to people in the streets and businesses of Westbury elicited a range of responses. Some did voice their opposition to the prison, strongly and articulately. Others were firm in their belief it would be a great benefit to the local economy.

But the more common response to my questioning was a kind of expectant agnosticism. People were resigned to the fact the prison would be built whether they liked the idea or not, and were prepared to make the most of the development, to turn it into an opportunity rather than a sentence.

As much as Johnston is clearly unhappy about the prison, this is his preferred stance as well.

“If it goes ahead, we have to turn it into a positive, not a negative,” he says. “We will need to do everything we possibly can to make this jail part of the community. There is potential for an industrial laundry to be established here, we have a bioenergy plant on the cusp of being built and maybe power from that could feed into the prison.

“And there’s the potential for other industries to be established to provide employment opportunities for prisoners learning a trade or getting integrated back into the community, like maybe a vegetable processing plant.”

Barns was insistent that this kind of focus on rehabilitation and reintegration would be absolutely vital to the planning of any second prison in Tasmania and that the Northern Regional Prison presented a unique opportunity for the state’s prison service to start doing things very differently.

“We would support it as long as it is a humane, rehabilitationfocused, progressive prison environment,” he says. “Wherever it is built, it needs to look nothing like Risdon Prison, it needs to be a campus-style prison with a focus on rehabilitation and education, and decent housing for prisoners.

“It is an opportunity to build a state-of-the-art model to show we can run a humane prison and get better results, lower recidivism, and actually help to keep people out of our prisons, rather than just building more prisons to house them.

“But if it’s just another bricks-and-mortar, greystone, barbedwire construction like Risdon then we would say don’t bother wasting taxpayers’ money on it. In that case we would be better off spending $270 million on anti-recidivism and diversion programs instead.”

The other benefit of building a northern prison is that it would allow easier visitation access for inmates’ families. Almost half of Tasmania’s prison population are from the north and North West of the state.

“There are very clear and well documented benefits for prisoners who have good access to seeing their families, especially their children,” Barns says. “Maintaining those family connections is vital to a prisoner’s rehabilitation and reintegrating into the community.

“At the moment a low-income family in Burnie can’t afford to drive or bus all the way to Risdon to visit a prisoner more than once every six weeks, so if we have northern prisoners actually housed in a northern prison, it will ease that strain and be a big benefit for rehabilitation.”

Simply building a new prison is not always the magic bullet for fixing an overcrowding crisis, either.

In Victoria the state-of-the-art Ravenhall Correctional Centre opened near Melbourne in 2017, the state’s biggest prison with a capacity of 1300 inmates, was touted as the solution to the state’s overcrowding crisis. Just two years later, Ravenhall has already been expanded once and is set to be expanded again, boosting its population to 1600 prisoners. Many single-occupant cells are double-bunked just to fit more prisoners in.

Aesthetically speaking, as imposing as a prison would be, it might not look too out of place at the location proposed, on the northern side of the Bass Highway. As it is, this district is already an industrial estate, sporting massive warehouses, towering silos, vast expanses of concrete and an endless parade of heavy vehicles entering and exiting all day.

While the area cannot be seen from Westbury itself, residents say they already experience high levels of light pollution, with a bright glow visible beyond the northern hills at night, and several people approached by TasWeekend referred to the offensive smell of “poppy trash” that wafted across from Tasmanian Alkaloids on a regular basis.

So, arguably, adding a prison to this industrial precinct would hardly be making it look much worse. In fact, if the early designs are to be believed, the planned perimeter of trees and vegetation around the prison might actually make the precinct look a little greener from the highway. But out of sight does not mean out of mind. While Westbury residents might not be able to see the prison from their township, they will still know it is there. And in tourism, reputation matters.

When you hear the name “Risdon”, chances are that you don’t immediately associate it with Risdon Cove or Risdon Vale. You probably think of Risdon prison. And Westbury residents are apprehensive about what it could mean for their tourismdriven economy if they become known as a prison town.

The town of Lara, near Geelong in Victoria, is already home to the notorious Barwon Prison and the newer Marngoneet Prison, which opened in 2006, and a third facility has been announced to be built on the same site. The Lara community, already sensitive about being known as the state’s prison capital, drew the line at the Victorian Government’s reference to the three-prison complex as the “Lara Prison Precinct”, lobbying the Government to remove the town’s name from the title. The project is now being referred to as the Chisholm Rd Prison Precinct.

Donaldson fears Westbury could suffer the same stigma if the planned prison goes ahead. “This prison will change the town’s entire identity,” she says. “We are known for our history and tourism attractions, we have the oldest village green in Australia, we have Pearns Steam World, the Westbury Maze, everything we’ve worked so hard to build here to attract tourists.

“No matter what official name they give to it, it will be known as the Westbury Prison. If you type the town’s name into Google, we don’t want a prison to be the first result that comes up. I don’t see any benefits for this village.”

In the meantime, community consultation is underway, with representatives of the Justice Department running a series community drop-in sessions at Westbury’s Fitzpatrick’s Inn, providing residents and business-owners the opportunity to air their grievances or ask further questions in one-on-one sessions with members of the prison’s project team.

Archer says community support and feedback is vital to the project and urged residents to take advantage of the drop-in sessions. “The people of Westbury can be assured that we are listening and responding, and we believe the project will be positive for the broader region as well and we will be working closely with them to ensure a good outcome for the entire community,” she says.

But Donaldson says the town is gearing up for a fight and will be in it for the long haul. Those opposed to the prison have been emboldened by the strong turnout at last week’s anti-prison rally in Westbury and the townspeople are forming an incorporated body to give their group a structure and a more organised approach to the fight.

“This way, we’re not just a loose group of angry locals or a community group, being incorporated gives us more legal status and a unified approach,” she says.

“We raised $3000 just at [last] Saturday’s rally alone, so we are deadly serious about this. We have two lawyers and three town planners in our group and they are all going over this proposal and already we are finding that the studies and examples given to us by the government, attempting to show us how much we will supposedly benefit from a prison, they just don’t add up.”

Johnston remains committed to a cautious wait-and-see approach, and is yet to be convinced of the touted benefits to the town. But he says he is committed to getting the best result for his region either way and even finds a kernel of humour in the situation.

“Hey, one of the first buildings to be built in Westbury was a gaol for the convicts, so at least there’s a kinda full-circle to it!”