Page 3091 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 15 September 1993
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Mr Deputy Speaker, I have not the slightest shred of doubt that, in every circumstance where our very competent police force in this Territory have exercised their power and moved a person or group of people on, that move-on has been deserved. I have no doubt that it has been possible to show that a fight was brewing, that damage to property was about to ensue or that some other kind of public disorder was about to result and that a move-on direction has averted it.
That is what the police have been telling the Minister and that is what you people are ignoring. The police of this Territory have demonstrated time and again that they can handle the responsibility which the move-on powers entail in their hands. The proof of that is that there have not been, to my knowledge or to the knowledge of the Minister apparently, at any time in the last three years or so, any complaints about the use of the move-on powers. That is the test that the Assembly imposed back in 1989 and again in 1991. We said, "We will give you these powers and you have to show that you can handle them responsibly. We have to see that there are no problems with the use of these powers in the Territory". That is what has happened.
There have not been problems. The problems that the people opposite raise, Mr Deputy Speaker, are problems of ideological concern. They are problems in theory. They are problems which have not been borne out by the operation of these move-on powers. So careful have our police been to ensure that these powers are not misused in the hands of an inexperienced young police officer, for example, that they are exercised only by police sergeants because they want to keep that capacity. They do not agree with the assertion put forward by the Minister for police that there are other means of dealing with these problems. Clearly, in many circumstances there are not. That is why they argue that these powers are a useful tool for preventing crime from taking place. That is what those opposite do not understand.
The Minister, Mr Connolly, says that police should not be drawn into conflict with young people through arbitrary powers. Mr Deputy Speaker, the fact of life is - and I make an observation here which unfortunately is borne out by the figures - that it is young people who are involved in crimes in these circumstances more often than other people. We do not find crowds of elderly people in our community vandalising property or involved in fights in public places. Unfortunately, it is young people who are most commonly in that category. The police will inevitably be in conflict with those people if they catch them committing those crimes.
Mr Deputy Speaker, if I were a parent - and I hope to be soon - and I found my child out in a public place committing some crime, some disorderly conduct or something of that kind, I would much rather that a policeman had come along first and told my child to move away and possibly prevented that child taking part in any criminal activity. He might come home browned off; but I would rather that happen than that he be caught committing a crime, prosecuted in some way, perhaps fined and possibly even imprisoned because he had committed a crime. I would rather that our police in this Territory had the capacity to prevent that crime from taking place, whether it was my young person or somebody else's young person about to commit that crime.
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