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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2977 ..

2005. This continues to show that this government is inactive in community safety, inactive in law and order and inactive in promise keeping.

I acknowledge the media release issued by the minister for police dated 25 June calling for tenders for the new $7.3 million Woden police station. That is good news. Mr Wood says that the ACT government is serious about community safety and that the new police station will help to ensure and encourage greater interaction between the community and its local police members. That is fine and it is about time, but where will we find the police to fill a new building for up to 120 police officers and personnel? Are we simply building an infrastructure when we do not have enough police? Therefore, is the appropriation properly weighted to make sure that we pick up those numbers? What good is a $7.3 million police station if there are not enough police officers to put in it to operate it?

The Stanhope government also has a major retention problem. It is going to buy additional police officers. That is certainly better than two years ago, but it has a retention problem. My concern is—and we cannot get a handle on this—what is the net gain or net loss of police officers in view of the existing wastage rates? We know we are losing experienced police. Feedback from the association, from the community and from police individually is that some quite experienced police are going. Part of that is due to the 55-year factor. It happens to be a generational thing, and the government cannot resolve that problem. That is a problem across all portfolios—nursing, teaching and police. However, an alarming number of police in their 30s and 40s are burning out too quickly. Along with the appropriation that we see here to buy additional police, we do not see concrete retention strategies to make sure that we keep experienced police.

We know, for example, that at Belconnen police station a typical police team, which should be six, often is not six and is often made up of quite junior constables and maybe one sergeant. A good police station team of about six should include an experienced sergeant, a senior constable and a balance of junior constables. That way they can operate effectively and safely, and there is a good balance of experience. This is a glaring deficiency at the moment and the government is not addressing that. The need for additional funding in ACT policing is not something that has been invented by us, despite all attempts from the Stanhope government to accuse us of this.

We also have a concern about national operations. Where is the domestic-level counter-terrorist plan? What does it look like? It is not good enough to say that that is a national police problem. I do not want to be romantic about this or extravagant, but the cold, hard facts are the ACT community, because of its federal, international, embassy and Department of Defence assets, is No 2 on the Australian terrorist list. That is the analysis from people who are far more qualified than we are. We do not want our community to get caught up in that, and we expect our ACT police force to be able to complement the national policing effort. National policing and national surveillance have a major role to play but at the community level ACT Police has a complementary role to play. That is why the building of its numbers and community policing are so important.

When I am fulfilling my field campaigning duties, speaking to the people in the electorate, I am overwhelmed by people complaining about the lack of police presence in the suburbs. I see the advertisements on TV and I believe the police are fair dinkum when they say we may not always be able to see them, but they are policing in a clever

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