Page 909 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 30 March 1993
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To start with the car theft figures, those presented by Mr Connolly for a six-month period were official Australian Federal Police figures provided by Assistant Commissioner Dawson. I have seen a copy of that correspondence, from Mr Connolly and from Mr Humphries. There is no doubt that the car theft figure for 1990-91, according to the AFP report, was 1,479, and that for 1991-92 it was 1,683 in that same AFP report 12 months later. That is the full picture for that period. However, the Minister did provide the Assembly with more up-to-date figures, and his representations on those reflect very much the line that he took in presenting them to the Assembly. I do not have any difficulty whatsoever with those figures.
The question of burglaries is perhaps a slightly different issue. The Minister said in this Assembly, in response to Mr Humphries's question:
... the simple fact is that housebreaking increases around Australia.
That seemed to imply that in fact we were simply in line with every State or Territory in the rest of Australia. Mr Humphries, in his remarks in representing the average figure, a weighted average figure across Australia, gave the impression that we were quite seriously out of step with those figures.
In considering the Australian Institute of Criminology figures that Mr Humphries provided me with, I had a look at the comparison between 1990-91 and 1991-92, and in fact the trend across Australia is all over the place. Mr Humphries did cite the figures for New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, where the rate of burglary seems to have declined, but he did not cite the figures for Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania and the ACT, which have gone up. Those rates vary quite substantially. The Queensland increase has been 6 per cent over 12 months; the Western Australian increase has been 2.5 per cent over 12 months; the Tasmanian increase has been a whopping 16.5 per cent over 12 months; and it is indicated that there is a 12 per cent increase in burglaries in the ACT at the moment. Mr Humphries has referred to Mr Connolly's perhaps selective reference to the burglary figures that he has cited in this Assembly. We could also perhaps accuse Mr Humphries of being fairly selective with the information that he has presented to this Assembly.
On balance, Madam Speaker, in terms of the evidence that has been presented today, I will not be supporting the censure motion. However, I would say that in the case of the burglary statistics that Mr Connolly presented he could perhaps have been a little bit more fulsome in explaining those figures, and perhaps could have got back to Mr Humphries, as he said he would do, according to the uncorrected proof Hansard from last week, with more accurate figures than he had available to him at the time.
MR CORNWELL (4.12): Madam Speaker, this has been a rather difficult censure motion to address because we are all dealing with figures on which people can put various interpretations. That has been fairly obvious from the approaches adopted by members of the Government, the Independents and the Liberal Party. I certainly have some concern about the remarks, specifically in relation to burglary, judging by what the Minister is already on record as saying. Among other quotes, there is this one:
... the simple fact is that housebreaking increases around Australia.
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