Page 5071 - Week 17 - Wednesday, 12 December 1990
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I think it is important that the Government have its police and its inspectors act early. To me, this is the key. Once the first person establishes a camp there, the battle perhaps will be lost. That is why the Social Policy Committee was so concerned for a close watch to be kept on camping. It is very important that the relevant officers be out all night. (Extension of time granted) They need to be out very early in the piece and out all night and they need to have sufficient authority and force to be able to make the relevant charges against people who are trying to break the system. Once you get a few campers along that strip, once cars go beyond excess in the suburbs, then it will be very hard to pull them all back into line. These are the thoughts I give, and I seek your response to those particular anxieties, Mr Collaery, as you rise in the debate.
MR COLLAERY (Attorney-General) (12.07): I thank Mr Wood for his very reasonable comments and his quite proper proposals for further action on surveillance matters. I will come back to them and I will answer them in detail. But first, Mr Speaker, I will deal with the comments made by the Chief Minister who, I thought, was less charitable on this issue. Mr Speaker, the Summernats - - -
Mr Berry: The Chief Minister?
MR COLLAERY: I am sorry. Did I say that? I meant the Leader of the Opposition.
Mr Kaine: Have I a problem you are not telling me about?
MR COLLAERY: Is this a Freudian lapse, or just the problem of late nights?
Mr Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition put about the fact that we were not sufficiently concerned with the matter. The Summernats were last held three weeks after this Government came to power. Clearly, there was insufficient time for us to coordinate all those issues. Since that time, Mr Wood - through you, Mr Speaker - we have provided a significant report to the Social Policy Committee of this Assembly which Mr Wood chairs.
That lengthy report from the Australian Federal Police provides a number of details, which I will not repeat; but it gives, for example, in statistical terms the following result: 163 arrests; 217 charges - and that would cover other matters that go by summons; a total traffic brief of TIN, as they are called, of 825; 2,916 hours of overtime for the police; $87,495 for the cost of overtime, and that might be balanced, to some extent, by the estimate that we might bring in $23,000, or thereabouts, in revenue from the penalties to be imposed for those offences.
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