Page 2802 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 11 October 2022
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… The AFPA said the Attorney-General should put the “welfare of the ACT community and ACT Policing members above that of serial criminals”.
“ACT Policing are doing their job in trying conditions, and clearly without the support of the judiciary and the Attorney-General,” he said.
“Policing is risky enough without having recidivist offenders on bail, intensive correction orders, or suspended sentences trying to mow them down while they commit further offences,” Mr Caruana said.
Madam Speaker, let me also speak to an article from the Canberra Weekly, titled “Reform of bail and sentencing in ACT needed, AFPA says”:
Operation Toric may have arrested 19 people – most of them recidivists – since it was set up at the start of the month; but will they face the full penalty of the law? “[Police] are being demoralised by the fact that they’re locking up crooks, and those crooks are then being released on bail for them to lock up and do their job over and over and over again,” Alex Caruana, president of the Australian Federal Police Association (AFPA), said.
… The AFPA is demanding a reform of the ACT’s bail and sentencing, appalled by a court decision to grant bail to a recidivist offender who allegedly attacked a policeman in the company of two other recidivist offenders …
“No police officer goes out on their job, puts their life on the line, and anticipates not going home being injured or in any other way. Unfortunately, in the ACT, an inordinate number of police officers have been injured on the job because criminals don’t respect the police officers. And that’s because the message from the ACT Attorney-General is: We don’t respect police officers either, because we don’t care about them enough to change the legislation to protect the police officers, nor the community.”
Madam Speaker, let me now turn to calls by Tom McLuckie and the many thousands who signed his petitions for Mr Rattenbury to stand down or be removed from office. One of the three petitions called for an independent review on the performance of the ACT judiciary in regard to sentencing in line with common and statutory laws because sentencing is not meeting community expectations. The petition states:
If the Attorney-General does not wish for a review of the performance of the judiciary due to his own legal and personal bias, prejudices, or political persuasions, then he should be considered unfit for office, and removed from his position by the Chief Minister.
Let me quote from Tom McLuckie’s Facebook post of 19 September. It is titled “Inconvenient truth for Attorney-General and Chief Minister”:
It is 4 months since my son died in the crash in the photo. Since then I have researched in detail the justice system approach in regards to its bail processes, sentencing and use of community based orders. Shane Rattenbury MLA is adamant that a review of the Judiciary is not warranted.
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