Page 2803 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 11 October 2022
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He also said:
“One terrible incident in your life is a terrible incident; we can never take that away … But we also have to think of the system response is and whether it’s a system problem.” I was advised by the police and Matthew’s death was “an accident waiting to happen”. We miss him every day.
The Attorney-General is still in denial we have systemic problems in the Justice System. I have been focussed on Road traffic Offences as per my campaign.
Of the 69 reported offences since my son’s death through ACT Policing media, (there may have been many more as I’m aware in the first 6 weeks 33 offenders were arrested under Operation Toric) we have the following:
Many of them involved in purposeful and deliberate driving at police, or driving up the wrong way of a major thoroughfare. Of the 69 offences reported, we have 17 bail breaches and 13 breaches of good behaviour, parole or intensive correction orders - in some cases we are dealing with orders being breached up to 10 times. That is 43% of offenders reoffending despite these conditions.
But Chief Minister Barr (who it appears his staff have blocked me tagging him in Facebook) and the AG don’t think there is anything to see here. Shane wants an “evidence based approach” to Justice. So do I. The truth and facts are inconvenient, but need to be addressed.
Madam Speaker, Tom McLuckie and the AFPA have relied heavily on evidence to make their case, as have we. It has been an enormous frustration to me for years that this government has not made the effort to collect and analyse the data so that it might understand the extent of the problem.
This has been a particular issue when it comes to bail, which has become a revolving door. So many serious offences are committed by perpetrators who are on bail or some other court order. It is almost a surprise to hear when that is not the case. It seems every time there is a serious crime the perpetrator is a recidivous offender who is on bail and also often on drugs, Madam Speaker.
I have moved several motions in this place, as I am sure the Attorney-General would acknowledge, and raised it annually during estimates and annual reports hearings for a decade. Let me quote from a couple of recent articles to highlight the problem.
From the Canberra Times, of 9 September this year, “The ACT is on target to report its highest ever number of arrests for breaches of bail conditions”:
The latest outcry comes as police-generated data has revealed over 940 breaches of bail by offenders in the ACT for the first half of the year, placing the territory on target to record the highest number of breaches ever …
… According to police data extracted from its secure PROMIS system, the highest 12-month tally of bail breaches was 1379, recorded back in 2019-20.
At the current rate of bail breach arrests and charges by police - running at an average of more than two a day - that previous high mark will be exceeded by almost 30 per cent by the end of the year.
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