Page 4024 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 24 October 1990
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Mr Collaery was excluded from the closed door agreement and only received details later. This is with reference to our police force and the agreement that he signed, and the agreement that was supported by the Alliance Government. It makes for real concern as to what this agreement is going to mean for the ACT, and is further reinforced, of course, by Mr Eaton, the national secretary of the AFP Association, saying that we have one police force and not two. I quite accept that. One has to look very carefully at the arrangement that we have entered into. It should be a role of a committee of this Assembly to do that and report back for discussion.
The most significant thing here is that, if we are going to spend $54m on police, then it is appropriate for us to determine to what extent we ought to be spending that money on the conventional or old-time role of police, and to what extent we should be spending the money on crime prevention.
The Australian Institute of Criminology has done a great deal of work on crime prevention. One of the best summaries of that is contained in a book titled Crime Prevention: Theory and Practice from the Australian Institute of Criminology and written by Susan Geason and Paul Wilson. That publication, along with a series of other publications from the Institute of Criminology and a series of other publications on crime prevention, would give the committee a flying start on how to deal with crime prevention; how best to spend $54m or $44m, or whatever amount it is that this community decides it can afford to spend on police.
What is quite clear - and this has become clear from most of the research - is that heaping more money into police forces in their traditional role is not the best way to spend money if you want to reduce crime. On page 1 in the introduction to the book from which I have just quoted, Crime Prevention: Theory and Practice, it is stated:
The lesson is clear: it is too expensive to wait till crimes are committed; crime must be prevented.
In regard to crime prevention techniques, as part of the introduction there is a series of dot points which include: preventing vandalism, preventing fraud, preventing armed robbery, and preventing arson. There is a series of about 11 or 12 publications that the Institute of Criminology has available on the whole range of matters that we now have to try to determine, and, particularly, how that sort of information, and any other information that can be assessed, can be applied to the ACT.
The theory behind crime prevention falls into four main categories: corrective prevention, punitive prevention, mechanical prevention, and environmental prevention. Corrective prevention has to do with establishing appropriate neighbourhoods. In Canberra we are very fortunate to have a system of planning that has allowed us
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