Page 1915 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 16 June 1993
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Ms Follett: You are joking!
MR CONNOLLY: Perhaps, as Ms Follett says, I would be joking if I thought that. That issue about the racially based or ethnically based fight needs to be put to bed. It was a disturbance among young people. That clearly is intolerable. The police have responded as you would expect them to respond to that sort of public order problem. There was a higher presence there last weekend and the incident has been resolved. Police are also working with the various schools to try to keep things calm. I would again stress that the people in that fight were not just from the valley; they were, it would appear, from throughout Canberra.
The front page of the Valley View again seemed to suggest that Tuggeranong was the area where crime was most out of control. I recall that a couple of years ago, when the Canberra Times wrote an article which suggested that Tuggeranong had a particular crime problem, the Valley View vigorously defended the valley and rather stridently attacked the Canberra Times for daring to suggest that Tuggeranong was the centre of crime problems. It rather disturbed me to see their own newspaper suggesting that Tuggeranong was the centre of crime problems. If anything is designed to create community disquiet and scare off would-be residents and would-be investors, it is a suggestion that an area is a particular crime front in Canberra.
As we pointed out at the time of the original suggestion in the Canberra Times some years ago, the fact is that Tuggeranong is a community which has a relatively lower level of crime than other areas of Canberra. On the latest figures that I have from the police, the number of offences reported per thousand of population across Canberra, for the financial year to date, is 86. For Tuggeranong it is 72. So, Tuggeranong is running below average on the number of offences reported per thousand of population. On the number of offences, it again is well below the average. The biggest area of concern for crime in Canberra is in fact the city district, the inner north and the inner south.
Tuggeranong, while it is the new suburbs, and while it has a very high proportion of young people, is not an area that is particularly crime prone. Indeed, it is an area which is relatively safe compared with other areas. However, that is not to suggest that the police or authorities can be complacent. We are aware of the rapid growth in Tuggeranong in recent years. Canberra has been served for quite some years now by three police districts - north, central and south. With the rapid growth of Tuggeranong, the south district is now proportionately much larger than the other districts. The Australian Federal Police have now implemented a division of Canberra into, in effect, four crime districts. Tuggeranong and Woden have been separated; the south district has been split in two. Whereas previously there was a superintendent in charge of the whole south district based at Woden, and a superintendent of crime based at Tuggeranong with crime responsibilities for the whole of the south side of Canberra, we now have a superintendent at Tuggeranong who is the superintendent with command responsibilities for the new Tuggeranong crime district. That is Superintendent Sandra Peisley who, incidentally, is the first woman to assume operational command of a district in Canberra, and that is a significant achievement.
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