Page 3454 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 25 November 1992
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While we have always said that we do not like broad and arbitrary powers, we have consistently said that if there were problems with specific offences we would be happy to look at them. I have been advised that there is a problem in relation to dealing with a street brawl under the current law of assault. My advisers are drawing up proposals, which I hope to bring before this Assembly in due course, for specific and quite well targeted new offences to deal with the all-in street brawl. I think members would generally be supportive of such powers when they come to be.
Madam Speaker, I return to some areas where we are on common ground with Mr Kaine. He stated very accurately that these are community problems. We really are seeing around Australia that we have to start taking a different attitude to these sorts of problems of behaviour in the inner cities. We just cannot say, "Look, it is a police problem. We will rely on our uniformed police to ensure that we have a safe city". We as a community spend something like $4 billion in Australia on law enforcement and the criminal justice system, from policing through to corrections. Yet we have seen over a decade in all States and Territories both a consistent increase in expenditure in that area and a consistent increase in crime. As I have said before - and it remains very valid - America pours vast resources into the criminal justice system, has vast numbers of police, imposes ever increasing sentences and puts more and more people in gaols, to the point where America has the highest imprisonment rate in the world; yet crime is out of control in inner city areas.
We have to deal with the problem as a community. Mr Kaine made a few remarks about values that need to be instilled at the family level, and indeed he is right. We as a community perhaps need to reinstil values about how we relate to one another. They are the sorts of issues that are being addressed increasingly around Australia now under the umbrella of crime prevention strategies. There is no quick and easy solution to this sort of a problem. It is an historical trend. As the National Committee on Violence, which reported a year or so ago, has said, there has been a steady increase in rates of violence throughout Australia in the postwar period. This has been a long ongoing trend within our society. It has taken a long time for us to get to where we are. It will take us a while to reverse the trend, but I believe that we can make advances. The criminal law does have a role to play. Where there are difficulties in the existing criminal law, this Government will be prepared to look at them. As I have said, my advisers have indicated that there is a problem in the way in which we can deal with the all-in brawl. I have indicated that I want some papers on that and I want some proposals for reform.
In relation to cooperation between business and police and between the community and police, we have a long way to go in the ACT. We are heading in the right direction. With the community policing strategy - all members have had the opportunity for briefings from the AFP on the results of the Small and Associates surveys - we are clearly moving in the right direction. We are getting our police away from the 1970s tradition of having police officers sealed away in a fast car, responding to radio calls around the town, running in, doing a job, getting back into the car and going off to another job. We are going to a new form of policing which is really not a new form of policing at all. It is an old form of policing. Police officers are walking the beat more and more. We are trying to get a police officer at a more senior level, at the sergeant level, to take
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