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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (26 June) . . Page.. 2247 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

You also mentioned police and youth. There are a number of very fine initiatives the police in the ACT conduct. Having been involved with youth in a number of areas, from coaching various football and basketball team, through to being a Children's Court solicitor and a prosecutor in a number of jurisdictions, I can certainly tell you that the police in the ACT seem to get on very well with youth, compared with the police in some of the States. We have a number of great initiatives. I was delighted to see, in the Canberra Times, Project Saul, an initiative of Senior Constable Steve Neuhaus, written up. Constable Neuhaus and his dedicated team, including Bob Cameron and some other police who have a lot of experience in bush matters, take marginal youth - in fact, often kids who are at the brink of going to Quamby; some might have even spent a short period of time there - out on a lot of good adventure training activities. They have had some fantastic results. No program is going to deliver you 100 per cent results with everyone; you are dealing with human beings. But that has been a particularly good program which has really helped a lot of kids and turned them around. There are a number of other very good programs, too, such as the programs the Police and Citizens Youth Club run. They run some excellent programs for youth.

Talking about youth centres: Certainly, there is often a big congregation of youth in Civic. Talking to Mary Lowa at the Civic Youth Centre, she has told me on a number of occasions over the last couple of years that the police and the youth have a very good rapport there. She has been very impressed with the attitude of a lot of the police there. Apart from that sort of rapport, you have to appreciate the criminal justice system, Ms Reilly; and that is that there are always going to be some people that will automatically complain to the IID or the Ombudsman when they are picked up by the police; it is almost a standard operating procedure. When you are dealing with some people in the criminal justice system, be they adults or juveniles, some of them are quite experienced in it; some of them have committed some very serious crimes. Police have a very difficult job to do there. The AFPA and some of the police, I think, have already commented on instances in that report in terms of whether or not they accept it all. I do not know the details. I make no further comment, except to say that they have already made comment on that.

I do know that police have an exceptionally difficult job to do. They deal with some exceptionally difficult people. In Canberra, I think they have - rightly so - an excellent reputation in terms of fairness and going about their most difficult duties. I commend them for their efforts in upholding the law in Canberra, for the generally very good rapport they have with youth and particularly for some of the excellent individual programs and efforts individual police make in terms of youth. (Extension of time granted) My experience as a prosecutor has been that the police often bend over backwards, especially with juveniles, to see whether they can do anything to stop them from being involved in a life of crime. In fact, they are often much more effective than a lot of other government agencies in helping kids. I think they do a good job there. I think we need to be careful when we criticise the police. That having been said, this Government has pushed a number of programs and funded a number of programs involving police and youth, and very successfully too, and will continue to do so.

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