Page 248 - Week 01 - Thursday, 18 February 1993
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Mr Humphries: What? What do these figures talk about?
MR CONNOLLY: We are talking, Mr Humphries, of the changes to police rostering arrangements in the last few weeks. They have not resulted in any change in Mr Dawson's views on the other Friday. In relation to the rhetoric of "crime is rampant in Canberra", I went through all of this last year, but I will just pick two figures to show how it can be misleading. Mr De Domenico, to his credit, did say that when you are citing statistics you always have to be careful, because they can say what you want them to say.
Clearly, the most dramatic increase is that in relation to sexual assault. There has been a 140 per cent increase. It is a matter of real concern, obviously. However, can I ask members to look back at the previous year's annual report because that will show trends. What in fact happened was that we had 140 offences reported in this year's annual report, and 58 offences the year before. So it is a 140 per cent increase. That is startling and staggering and a matter for concern. The year before it was 123. So we have fluctuations. We do not have a pattern of rapid escalation; we have fluctuations. We have 123 one year, down to 58 the next year, and up to 140 the next year. What that really shows is an increase of 17 over two years, which is around 10 per cent. That is still a worry, although I would say that the rate of reported sexual assault will continue to increase, and it must, because sexual assault is not reported often enough.
We know, in relation to incest in particular, that it is not widely reported. We know that many women have concerns about the way the criminal justice system addresses sexual assaults. We will implement some of the reforms that I am confident will come out of our Community Law Reform Committee's reference on the way we prosecute sexual assault. It is the only time that issue has been looked at by a law reform committee in Australia, and we are the only government that has looked at this issue of how the criminal justice system, in its procedural aspect, protects women. I would expect that reports of sexual assault will increase because women will be more confident that the system is able to protect them. So that is something that we should not shy away from.
As I have always said, the really viable set of figures to look at if you are worried about crime and criminality in a community is the trend series published by the Institute of Criminology. They show the rate of crimes per 100,000 of population. They consistently show that the ACT has the lowest or the second-lowest rate of crime or criminality in Australia. In some matters Tasmania is safer than we are, particularly in motor vehicle theft, which may have something to do with the difficulty of getting hot motor vehicles out of Tasmania. But generally we are either the safest, or the safest but Tasmania, jurisdiction in Australia, and that is not changing.
It is easy to whip up some hysteria. While I am not saying, "Everything is fine. We do not have to worry"; we are addressing strategies for crime prevention. Our crime prevention strategy for the ACT which we will further develop - although I think we will probably wait until after the election to bring it forward because otherwise cynical Liberal politicians will try to undermine it - is the way of the future. It is the way of ensuring that Canberra remains as we like it - a safe community - but we are a community in the last decade of the twentieth century in Australia and the sort of steady increase in crime that we see throughout
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