Page 2372 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 16 September 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
On one occasion he found vomit smeared all over his shopfront as a result of a confrontation earlier in the evening with a group of youths. The next morning the shopowner was forced to clean the vomit off his shopfront. I do not think those things are anything to be complacent about. They demand action. They demand swift and decisive action on the part of the ACT Government.
The question is: What are we to do about this? The first problem is identifying that you have a problem. The second is: What do you do about it? The Liberals have long had a two-pronged approach to crime. The first arm concerns simply dealing with the symptoms. It means dealing with crime at its place of commission. It means unashamedly getting tough with criminals. Our record stands. We have introduced move-on powers - a policy supported by the member for Canberra, Ros Kelly. We have introduced dry-area laws. We have attempted to toughen the Bail Act. We have done a number of other things in this place which I think indicate that we believe that there must be a much stronger effort in combating crime as it manifests itself in this community.
The second arm of our attack is, in fact, to deal with the underlying causes of crime. That means creating and producing real and lasting jobs through lifting the tax burden on business and allowing business to expand and grow and remove the great pool of unemployed who unfortunately have been the chief victims of circumstances that obviously, as the DPP suggests, have some connection with the problem of increasing crime.
Labor's recession has almost certainly helped to contribute to higher crime rates. I do not exonerate the Federal Government by any means; but the local Labor Party has contributed by omission, if nothing else, to these serious statistics. They have opposed move-on powers. They have opposed dry-area legislation. They have done nothing about the fight against armed robbery. They have failed to open the psychiatric wing at the Belconnen Remand Centre. They became involved in an unnecessary and protracted industrial dispute with police last year. They stripped $1.2m from the police budget last year, and we are told that they can take more from the police budget this year without affecting the quality of crime prevention and strategies pursued by the police. I remain to be convinced.
In the last election, the Chief Minister promised not just to sustain police numbers in the ACT but to actually put more police on the beat on our streets. We support this move - and we supported it then - and we have been calling for a proactive approach to policing for a long time. But this budget, as far as I am able to see, has not produced that increase in police numbers. I understand that the $1m that we have spoken about already is to go towards making the police budget's contribution to the general savings across the board in the ACT. The Minister might correct me if I am wrong. The $1m savings that we are generating here will not go into extra policing. They will go into simply meeting a reduction in the amount given from Consolidated Revenue for police operations in this financial year. The question remains: Where are extra police coming from and when are they going to arrive? Other questions need to be asked. What has happened to pub card? When are we going to get our safety house scheme promised by Labor in the last election? When is that psychiatric wing at the Remand Centre going to open? What about the crime prevention councils that the Government promised at the most recent election?
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .