Page 685 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 5 July 1989
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pressures on other committees. There are a couple of points which we need to look at. Firstly, all the committee will be doing is looking at this one issue. I am sure that if the committee feels that there is not time, as Mr Wood suggests, it will allow further time; otherwise it will report in the time given to it.
Mr Collaery mentioned that a sunset clause could well be allowed in the legislation, and that is something at which, I think quite properly, the committee should look. So I commend the motion to the house. I think we need to look at the matter, and we need to look at it quickly.
MRS GRASSBY (Minister for Housing and Urban Services) (11.48): I rise to speak against the motion. The one thing that worries me about giving police more powers, when I think they have enough powers now, is my experience of the original people of this country who have suffered, not only in New South Wales but also in Queensland and every other State, because of police brutality. We have just had an inquiry into that, and we have found the amount of police brutality is rather frightening. It does not stop with the people who are our black brothers or the original people of this country; it even goes as far as the people whose first language is not English. I can relate story after story from the Human Rights Commission of people who have suffered under the hands of police brutality.
I am not saying that all police carry this out. Seventy-five per cent, I am sure, or maybe 90 per cent of the police do a very good job and do it under difficult conditions. But there is a percentage of the police that do not, and it has come out in the inquiries into the Aboriginals who have been found hanging themselves in gaols, and it has come out time and time again in the newspapers we have read about the people whose first language is not English, who have not been understood and who have been treated as second-class citizens.
So I say, Mr Speaker, that if we go ahead with this in such a hurry - as Mr Wood has pointed out, this is a decision that cannot be made overnight - then we may regret it. We may be saying to these people who have suffered that we do not really care about it, that we have passed a Bill and that it will look after everybody in the shopping centres and at night-time. I am very sorry for anybody who has been accosted and who has genuinely been upset or hurt by hoodlums and people like that. But the police already have powers to do something about that, and they are not using them. They just want more powers so that it is so much easier to run somebody in, maybe give them a few kicks in the right place and then say they fell or something like that. I have seen many a report of the Human Rights Commission that has said exactly that - "He fell down the stairs as we were taking him to the cells" or something like that - when the report that the person has made has been, "I was kicked down the stairs".
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