Page 2373 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 16 September 1992
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The approach pursued by people such as Alcoholics Anonymous is that the first thing you have to do is admit that you have a problem with drink and then you can deal with it. My comment to the Labor Government today is: "Let us admit that we have a big problem in this Territory with crime". We must admit that and stop playing down this problem all the time by saying, "Oh, it is just a beat-up; it is not really a big problem. Don't worry. It will all be right at the end of the day". Once we get over that mentality, then we can get onto the business of actually dealing with the symptoms of the problem. We cannot accept excuses. We need to acknowledge that we have a serious problem. We need to tackle escalating crime rates, and we must focus on this issue. If this Government does not get off its butt and do something about it, crime rates will continue to escalate and the people of the ACT will continue to experience the brunt of that increasing crime, and violent crime in particular.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (3.42): Whenever the Tories are in trouble and have nothing to say, they beat the crime can. We saw that in the United States when George Bush thumped the old Willy Horton ads. We are seeing it in Queensland, where the local Liberal Party has absolutely nothing to offer. All it can come up with is a very distasteful series of television ads which purport to blame the Labor Government for a particular unpleasant murder. Of course, we see it with the Federal Liberals and the old "We are all afraid to go into the streets at night" pamphlet which was circulated around Australia featuring a woman who lives in Hughes - one of the safer suburbs in Canberra, which is one of the safest cities in Australia.
It is not surprising that the Liberals are running this MPI the day after the budget. Clearly, they have nothing to say about the real issues facing Canberra, so they try to thump the crime can.
Mr De Domenico: Read the Canberra Times.
MR CONNOLLY: I would be surprised if the Canberra Times were interested in this issue, because there was nobody from the Canberra Times here to listen to Mr Humphries's speech. As they did not feel that it was worth listening to Mr Humphries's speech, they are not coming down to listen to my speech. I hardly think you have hit the big issues. I should say, though, at the outset, that Mr Humphries did make an important sensible statement - that Canberra continues to have crime rates which are well below the Australian averages. The question of what the crime rate is is not easy to answer. We have statistics and counter-statistics. Mr Humphries mentioned at one point in his speech that almost any set of statistics can be suspect. The figures that I have always worked from are figures which come from the Australian Institute of Criminology. The institute puts out a publication about every year on the size of the crime problem in Australia. That was updated a couple of months ago to the financial year 1990-91. It does not have the 1991-92 financial year figures, which we ourselves do not yet have from the AFP. They will be going into the AFP annual report.
I table a series of statistical charts which we have had done on a colour printer. They show the rates for a range of offences across Australia. Our opinions can differ about this; but the sensible rate to look at to show you what the problems are is the rate of crime per 100,000 of population, so that you can sensibly compare a crime rate in Canberra with a crime rate in Sydney. Such figures show
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