Page 4022 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 24 October 1990
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Mr Speaker, I have opted for suggesting a select committee on this occasion. I am aware that we have a Standing Committee on Legal Affairs, but this matter crosses many social as well as legal aspects, and the Legal Affairs Committee deals mainly with the legal aspects of this Assembly. With that in mind, I consider that what I am presenting is considerably different from what would normally be dealt with by the Legal Affairs Committee and is something that could well be a cross between legal affairs, on the one hand, and the Standing Committee on Social Policy, on the other hand, remembering that the Social Policy Committee also has a number of references before it.
I have given the reporting date for this proposed committee as 30 April 1991. One of the reasons for giving that reporting date is that already a tremendous amount of information is available on crime prevention, and it is really a matter for the committee to assess the crime prevention aspects to see to what extent they can be implemented in the ACT.
I refer, firstly, Mr Speaker, to the article by Peter Clack and AAP, which was in today's paper. It states:
The ACT clean-up rate was rated lowest in Australia for the past three years ... consistently equal lowest for 10 years.
... ... ...
Of 20,111 reported crimes in the ACT in 1988-89 only 4190, or 20.83 per cent, were cleared by police, the report said.
I think it is very important to emphasise here that the clean-up rate is only one small measure of police performance and that it is a very small portion of the picture. That has not been, I believe, fairly reported in the Canberra Times this morning. The rest of the picture does a great deal of credit to our police force who have put a great deal of time and effort and a tremendous number of their resources into community policing. It may well be that in moving their resources that way their clean-up rate lowers but their crime prevention rate increases. If that is the effect of what they have done - that needs to be assessed, so it would be part of the role of this proposed committee - it would be a great credit to the police. The community has to ask to what extent we want that role to be handled by the police and to what extent we believe that the police are funded appropriately for that role.
It is quite clear that police funding has increased by more than 67 per cent over the last couple of years. If we go back to 1985-86 and look at the Commonwealth Grants Commission's findings, we find that there has been a significant increase in the amount of money per capita that we in the ACT pay to retain a police force, compared with the rest of Australia. There are long arguments in the Australian Capital Territory's submission to the
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