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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (23 May) . . Page.. 1582 ..

In recent weeks I announced that the AFP would move to civilianise its communications centre, replacing trained police officers with civilian call-takers. The AFP's communications centre will now be staffed by specially trained civilian officers, and those police positions which are freed by the civilianisation will be transferred to operational duties.

The government has also announced that the AFP will create two special strike teams, independently resourced and accountable for their activities, which will target the high-profile activities respectively of burglaries and car thefts. These teams will be mirrored on two concepts, but differing slightly from each other. The first is the highly successful National Avian Strike Teams which target high-level drug trafficking offences. The second is the outstandingly successful Police Operation Chronicle, which targeted burglaries and car thefts in late 1999. This new strategy will feature an intelligence-driven approach to solving crime problems.

Mr Speaker, the commitment to civilianise communications will provide 29 police positions, all of which will be transferred to these new strike teams. But today I am announcing that the government will supplement a further 15 new police positions during the next financial year, all of them being used to combat rises in burglary and car thefts through the new strike team approach.

Adopting a recommendation from the Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety in its report on the draft budget, the government will provide funding for the creation of six community beat police officers, starting from 1 January 2001. These officers will work in local communities, with a crime prevention focus, developing intelligence for investigations to combat serious crime. I have asked the Australian Federal Police to develop comprehensive operational plans for these community beat police officers, including areas which will be targeted.

These initiatives represent a commitment of 50 new operational police officers to the ACT in the next financial year, the largest ever boost to police resources.

In addition, Mr Speaker, the government is establishing a $1.2 million crime prevention fund which will be used to establish partnerships with insurance companies and other industry groups to allow the community to access new initiatives to prevent crime, particularly property crime. Some of the concepts being explored by the government include subsidies to access vehicle immobilisers, along the lines under trial in Western Australia, and subsidies for deadlocks or alarms in houses in high-crime suburbs.

A further $92,000 will be made available each year for police to purchase special equipment, or trial new technology, to aid the strike teams in their crime prevention work. I should add that this investment in crime fighting is the largest ever by an ACT government and can only happen because we got the fundamentals of the budget right in the first place.

Five years of responsible financial management gives us the ability to commit these resources knowing that we are not going into debt to fight property crime as one of the ACT's growing social problems. Contrast all of these initiatives with Labor's approach to police when in office. Every year the police budget was cut, even when crime was increasing dramatically. Also, following the dramatic change in driver behaviour after

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