Page 3090 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 15 September 1993
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Mr Humphries: They feel badly when they are arrested too; but they cannot really avoid that fact, can they?
MR BERRY: That is fine. If you have done something wrong you get arrested for it.
Mr Humphries: So it is all right to feel badly in those circumstances, is it?
MR BERRY: If you are guilty of a crime you get arrested and you get taken to the courts. You end up with thousands of young people who are unhappy about the police - - -
Mr De Domenico: How many? Thousands?
MR BERRY: Thousands. Two-thousand-five-hundred have been moved on thus far. None of them have been proven to be criminals. All of them would be disgruntled about the fact that they were moved on although they had not been found guilty of anything. That is the situation. I am surprised that most police do not resist these move-on powers. In my view, they make their job more difficult. If you want a community police force which is effective, it must have the confidence of the community. You cannot tell me that, with the use of these move-on powers to the extent that they have been used, there would not be a lot of disgruntled people who would not have been in that frame of mind were it not for the move-on powers. There is no question about it. If you were summarily found guilty of something, you would feel a bit unhappy about it - if you were not guilty of any crime.
Mr Humphries: How could they be guilty and not guilty?
MR BERRY: If you are arrested for committing a crime and taken to the courts, that is fair enough. So, Mr Deputy Speaker, I think the Liberals - - -
Mr Stevenson: If you are not guilty, you still feel disgruntled.
MR BERRY: You will be feeling disgruntled all your life. That is fair enough for you. I think you deserve it. This is an unfair law which I am not sad to see the passing of. It has gone, and gone forever, and that is the way it ought to be. Mr Deputy Speaker, this is an unfair law that makes it harder for the police. It is not good for the community. Mr Humphries's proposal deserves to fail.
MR HUMPHRIES (11.54), in reply: Mr Deputy Speaker, in closing the debate, it is clear that there are a great many misconceptions floating around this chamber - some accidental, some quite deliberate, I have no doubt - which those opposite would like to perpetuate in order to justify their outrageous decision, in my view, to scratch what has clearly been an effective tool in the hands of our police for dealing with problems in our streets.
Mr Deputy Speaker, Mr Berry in particular demonstrates the major misconception inherent in the move-on powers arguments put forward by his side when he claims insistently that most people have been moved on unfairly; that they have not deserved to be moved on. It is one thing to say that a person might not have been caught committing a crime when a police officer came upon a group of people in a certain circumstance; it is quite another to say that when they are moved on pursuant to a police direction they are unfairly moved on.
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