Page 3449 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 25 November 1992
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In any industry growth rates of this magnitude would be welcomed as a sign of an economic miracle. Unfortunately, this Government has not delivered economic growth of this order of magnitude. It has permitted, instead, a phenomenal level of growth in the most undesirable of industries: Violence, robbery, assault, rape, theft, vandalism and drunkenness. The Government has developed and pursued a consistent program of liberalising laws relating to civic behaviour. In a truly liberated society, that of course is most desirable; but to pursue those liberalising policies in the face of overwhelming evidence that this type of social experimentation is failing is madness. The solution to these problems is not to continue the process of reducing controls on anti-social behaviour, but to put further liberalisation on hold while taking steps to identify the root causes of our problems and dealing with them. Parents and the entertainment and tourism industries have called for stiffer laws relating to violence and public drunkenness and disorder. Stiffer laws mean tougher penalties consistently applied.
The economic disaster that we find ourselves submerged in at the moment clearly exacerbates the level of violence and criminal activity in the community. Young people desperate to survive in the city are driven to violent crime and to more pervasive criminal activity such as theft, housebreaking and assault. Frustrated at their failure to find work and to take their place in the ordered structure of society, locked out of the respectable middle-class life that we hold up to them as a model, many young people, perhaps understandably, vent their frustration in violence. That violence is often against people and, less tragically but nonetheless expensively, against property. It is mindless; it is enraged; it is indiscriminate.
That view is supported by the observed facts in Garema Place, Manuka and such places. Drunken behaviour and violence are perpetrated not entirely by people in nightclubs but by those unable to afford entry to those places - the poor, the victims of the economic crime that we are enduring at the moment. Madam Speaker, we cannot expect to see change in that behaviour until opportunities are recreated for young people to join in the mainstream of social and economic life. I submit that in this context training is an inadequate response to the urgent social and economic needs of our day.
The Follett Government has in all its budgets since self-government in 1989, to be fair, increased expenditure on programs compensating for criminal behaviour or dealing with the consequences of it. Counselling services have been increased for the victims. Cells at the Remand Centre have been expanded in number. Facilities at Quamby have been made more secure. Policy attention has been paid to the development of prison facilities in the ACT as an option to sending ACT prisoners into New South Wales gaols. Refuges for the victims of domestic violence have been provided. But all of these things, while necessary and beneficial, are treating the results of anti-social behaviour rather than attempting the better course of trying to ameliorate that behaviour. Even a few minutes ago the Chief Minister tabled the national strategy on violence against women and in her speech outlined the things that her Government had done. She mentioned five things. Only one of them had to do with changing behaviour. The others talked about treating the consequences of crime. So, the Government still, right to this moment, is putting its emphasis in the wrong place.
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