Page 3077 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 15 September 1993
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I am advised that between 1 June 1992 and 1 September this year, a period of some 15 months, 31 incidents - and some of those were motor vehicle incidents - were reported to the police from the Belconnen interchange. This is the so-called hot spot of gang violence that the Liberal Party rhetorically has been waffling on about on commercial and ABC radio and television in recent weeks. When I asked the police for a report on what was going on at the Belconnen interchange, the report that came back from the police was, "All quiet on the western front". You have to take with a very substantial grain of salt - one would indeed say a boulder of salt - anything that the Liberal Party says about this issue of crime and justice.
The Liberal Party has also misused statistics. It has divided the number of people that police estimate have been involved by the number of times the move-on power has been used. Mr Humphries has done that and argued that it indicates that the power is used, on average, against gangs of 17 or more people. By dividing the number of people estimated to be involved by the number of times the power has been exercised you do get the figure of 17. But when you break down these figures it shows that in 32 per cent of situations the group numbered two or less, and in 45 per cent of the situations the group numbered four or less. There are some cases where the move-on power has been used against very large groups of people, but there are many cases where the move-on power has been used against small groups of people.
Madam Speaker, the Government has always taken the view that you should not use an arbitrary power to give the police power to deal with a citizen who has committed no offence. If the police believe that a citizen has committed an offence, the police have the ability to charge that citizen or to use old-fashioned, country-style policing. That is the style of community policing that we are trying to get back to. The police officer is known to the local community, is part of the local community, and says, "Look, you fellows, if you do not settle down I will charge you". That is a perfectly appropriate exercise of a police discretion. I do not believe, and the Government does not believe, that police should be able to exercise arbitrary statutory powers against individuals who have committed no crime.
The downside - I think that this is a very serious downside, and I ask members to consider this very seriously in relation to this vote - is that many young people are having their first contact with police officers in this confrontational role. They take the view that they are doing nothing wrong. They are hanging out with their friends. They may be dressed in the fashion of the day. They may have the torn jeans and the backward baseball cap. A member of this Assembly - I cannot recall whether it was Mr Moore or Ms Szuty - made the comment on radio recently that they wondered how many people in a private school uniform had the move-on powers exercised against them as opposed to the number of young people who dressed in the torn jeans, the backward baseball cap and the colourful jackets. It may not have been one of the members. I apologise. It may have been a member of the community. I thought it was a very interesting comment. The favoured fashion of youths between the ages of 15 and 18 is something that may well not bring them into favourable view with persons in authority, but that is not a crime. It is not a crime to be chatting with your mates in the streets of Canberra dressed in your torn jeans and your black T-shirt or whatever. The police should not be put in a situation where they are drawn into conflict with young people through the exercise of arbitrary power.
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