Page 251 - Week 01 - Thursday, 18 February 1993
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The third point about relative staffing levels and the need to cut has to be made in conjunction with the observation that you need to compare like with like. Mr Connolly quoted at length the number of people who live in the Newcastle area and the Wollongong area and the Gold Coast area of Australia and compared the number of police that serve those areas and said that we have many more police in our area of equivalent population size and therefore we have too many. He did not mention that places like Newcastle, for example, do not have a forensic laboratory. Places like Wollongong do not have police training facilities. Places like the Gold Coast do not have special operations teams. None of those areas have bomb squads or dog squads or drug squads because those are State-wide responsibilities. Those things come from Sydney or Brisbane when they are needed. We do not have that luxury in the ACT. We have to supply our own because we are a separate jurisdiction. The comparisons Mr Connolly has made are stupid - in fact, rather less than I would have expected from him. For the same reason the per capita comparisons that he has made simply do not stack up.
The other really big furphy is that crime rates are not rising really; reporting is rising. Mr Connolly has supported that assertion by referring again and again to sexual assault and saying that the 141 per cent rise in sexual assault is attributable to the fact that people are reporting it more than they were in the past, for various reasons. He is absolutely right. That is a very good reason why we should see a rise in the reporting of sexual assault and a rise in its incidence. But it begs the question: What particular reason was there that people were not in the past reporting these other crimes and are now suddenly coming out of the closet to report them? Were people worried about reporting armed robbery because they would not have had a sympathetic ear from the police? Were they worried about fraud misappropriation because they might be victimised and ostracised in society? Why were people not prepared to report burglary in the past? Why were people not prepared to report motor vehicle theft in the past?
Mr De Domenico: Or arson.
MR HUMPHRIES: Or arson, or indecent exposure? It is the most ridiculous argument. The exception is sexual offences, and the citing of that exception proves the case. The fact of life is that these crimes really are rising. In fact, if anything the recent events would make one believe that the reporting of crime would start to decline in this community. When police do not go to the scenes of crimes perhaps for two days after the person reports, say, a break-in or a minor theft, as indeed they now do due to these cuts, then we could expect to see a decline in reporting rates. So in the circumstances it is a pretty serious outcome.
The next furphy is that Canberra is not as bad as Sydney or Melbourne. Madam Speaker, that assertion is an admission of failure on the part of this Government. Of course, we are not as bad as Sydney or Melbourne, nor should we ever be. The comparison between Sydney's or Melbourne's crime rates and Canberra's is utterly insulting. The fact of life is, however, that in some categories of crime at the present rates we will approach Sydney or Melbourne with great speed. The NRMA said not very long ago that if the rate of house burglary continues at its present level in the ACT we will soon be comparable with Sydney and Melbourne, because rates in Sydney and Newcastle are presently falling.
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