Page 2763 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 14 August 1991
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It is very easy for a young person who has been told by a policeman to move on to say later, "I was an innocent victim. I was not doing anything wrong and along came this policeman who told me to move along".
I suspect that there are very few policemen, if any, who would bother young people if they were doing nothing wrong or if they looked like they were not about to do something wrong. I have more faith in our police officers than to say that they would always or frequently tell young people to move on if they were indeed doing nothing wrong. I do not accept the proposition that the police are always wrong.
Mr Connolly extrapolated from that and said that this is really an attack upon civil liberties. One must ask the question, "Whose?". If I am sitting in a bus depot late at night and I am being annoyed or harassed, or I am concerned about the behaviour of some young people in that place, I have some civil liberties too. If a policeman comes along and says to those young people, "Knock it off, kids; it is time you were home and off the streets", then I am interested in their protecting my civil liberties too. There are two sides to this case. So, when the Labor Party and Mr Connolly argue that this is an attack upon civil liberties, I again ask the question, "Whose civil liberties are we talking about?".
Then Mr Connolly appealed to the fact that New South Wales does not have such a law and therefore we should not have it. He did not pursue that argument for very long. In other cases over the last 18 months when we were in government we were frequently told that we should not do something because they did not do it in New South Wales or vice versa. Now we have the argument being reversed. We are told that because New South Wales does not have such a law neither should we. He acknowledged that the Northern Territory and South Australia do, however, and I wonder whether he ever asked them why they have such a law.
He is the Attorney-General and one would argue that if the State of South Australia and the Territory of the Northern Territory have such a law there could well be some good reasons for it. But I presume that, as Attorney-General, he did not bother pursuing that because he did not want to know the answer; he did not want to be persuaded that there was good reason for having such a law.
He went on and said, "We, the Labor Party, favour specific offences". I presume that what he is saying is that the New South Wales situation, where somebody has to be charged with an offence before they can be taken off the streets, is the right way to go. He prefers specific offences. He does not favour a system where a crime can be prevented before it occurs. He wants a system where young people in particular - he was talking about young people - actually commit a crime before the police can take any action.
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