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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 8 Hansard (8 August) . . Page.. 2602 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

Mr Deputy Speaker, this result has been long overdue. It has taken this government six years to address the problem. It is no good giving us history lessons about what Ms Follett did in 1991 or what Labor may have done in 1995 and 1994 without expecting a similar history lesson in return. It is a fact that when Labor was in there were 20 more police per 100,000 people in the ACT than there are now, even with the extra 50 police that have been allocated to the AFP, so let us not trumpet any success government versus government.

Over the years the Productivity Commission reports and the ABS reports have provided a true indication of where crime is heading in the ACT. I think one of those reports labelled Canberra as the burglary capital of Australia. The most recent ABS report stated that Canberra still has the highest rate of motor vehicle theft, notwithstanding the very significant reduction. We still have the highest. Mrs Burke said we have not acknowledged the rate at which personal assaults have dropped, but I will come to that later.

Mr Deputy Speaker, the writing has been on the wall for six years. It has taken until now for this government to act. A cynic would say they have acted because it is an election year and they want the flashy statistics for their election brochures. Well, in 1995, when Labor was last in office, there were 1,646 vehicle thefts, 4,998 burglaries and 6,873 property damage incidents. In the year 2000, after five years, vehicle thefts were at 3,087, burglary at 7,944, and property damage at 9,813. In five years vehicle thefts have doubled, burglaries have gone up 58 per cent and property damage has gone up 43 per cent. In my view, in the last five years the government, just like Nero, has fiddled while Rome burnt.

It is great that Operation Anchorage has been a success, but if it was such a success why don't we keep the initiative going? We should have designated officers working on particular crime problems every day so that the figures do not spiral out of control again.

There have been rumours that other areas of policing have suffered because officers have been pulled from normal operational duties to work on the task force. In an answer I received to a question on notice, the minister said that 45 officers were working on Operation Anchorage and they were pulled from the territory investigation group, patrols and support areas. The minister admitted that Operation Anchorage invariably was impacting on other areas of ACT policing. These special task forces need to be run while maintaining normal policing levels. It is unsatisfactory to reduce the number of random breath tests during the three months that a task force operates.

I understand that the Belconnen station has been operating below strength. In a response I received from the minister he said that individual shifts have been substantially below strength on a number of occasions. When we confront the minister publicly, like the former Chief Minister he denies it. He denies and denies.

It is amazing how the minister picks the good bits out of crime statistics and puts unbelievable spin on it. This was most recently seen in an article written by the minister in the Canberra Times on 30 July this year. He referred to some pretty amazing figures. For instance, the minister referred to an ABS report of 2000 which showed that the ACT had the largest decrease in stolen motor vehicles, but he stopped midway through the

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