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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (17 February) . . Page.. 243 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

were trained and get hurt. Honestly, it frightens the living daylights out of me that we as community leaders would be partly responsible for that. That is one of the reasons why we need to have this inquiry.

If it has taken this Government five years to come to the realisation that we need to do something, this inquiry might just give them a little bit more incentive to get on and do something. Hopefully, it will. It will also provide them with some factual information, I am hoping.

One of the big issues in the terms of reference is community perceptions. I suppose you could talk about that in terms of community confidence. I have received an enormous number of calls to my office from people saying, "I went round to the police station and they were closed". That came from Gungahlin. A bloke who lived in Red Hill said his car was vandalised. He understood that it was not a big issue for the police in their categorisation of offences, but three or four blokes down the road had the same experience on the same night, and it was not the first time it had happened to him. He rang the police and said, "Can you send somebody over please and check it out? Maybe we have a spate here". They said, "Sorry, category 3 call out. We do not attend. We cannot get Forensic to come and have a look". That is not good enough, Mr Speaker.

In Tuggeranong, my part of the world, about 12 months ago on a Saturday night there was only one police car and a sergeant's car out to cover the safety of 93,000 people. I want to know where the rest of the police are, if that is all the coverage we have. I can understand why people are starting to lose their confidence in the police - not in the individual policeman, as I said before. As soon as the police attend, everything is fine. It is getting them out there.

Mr Osborne referred to police numbers. This is a moving feast, an absolute ripper. We have heard several statements in the space of a week. There are 694 policemen for which we pay $56m. I heard that of the 694 the ACT component was 604 and 90 was applied to the federal scene. I think that is the figure that we are pretty much aware of. In today's paper, the Chief Police Officer has quoted 599 ACT and 95 Federal. Commander McDevitt, addressing the Tuggeranong Community Council not long ago, said that, as a policy, the AFP do not go beneath the baseline of 694. That is nothing short of garbage. We are talking about it being a full-time equivalent 694. As anybody with any knowledge of maths knows, if you are running it at 700-odd for six months, which is the case now, to balance it out at 694 so we do not have pay all that extra money, we will run for the following six months at something like 500.

There is a question about the figures. The numbers seem to change. They should not. We would like to know a little bit more about that. I would like to get it on the record and out there in the community. If we have 604 policemen, or 603 or 599, the community want to know where they are. We want to know about the distribution of those resources. How come you can go down the highway and find six police cars doing random breath tests but you cannot get someone to come out to your house when there is a home invasion? The community want to know why that is so. There may be a very good reason. If there is, let us come clean with it.

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