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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2978 ..

way and getting results. That is the story they sell, but I do not know whether the community is all that confident about that. For a long time the community has been saying that it is concerned about the lack of presence and the lack of visibility of police on the streets, particularly in suburbs and shopping centres after 9.00 pm.

In recent days I have talked about the level of vandalism in Jackie Howe Crescent, Macarthur. People there talk about the 20 per cent annual increase in vandalism in their streets. I have talked about the shopkeepers in Chisholm. I have talked about the shopkeepers in Torrens and Pearce who were concerned about damage there. At the weekend I caught up with a majority of shopkeepers in Chisholm who say they have been vandalised so many times it is not funny. A number of these shops have been burgled two, three or four times. Outside the take-away cafe in Chisholm young juveniles are trading drugs in the public phone box. That is exactly the theme I reported last week in my MPI about what happens in Isaacs shops. The crazy thing is: these activities seem to go on and on. In Chisholm, unmarked police cars have diligently responded. They try to get there but it is often too late. There simply are not enough police to be able to sit around for the days and nights that it would take to catch people. There is a big question about resourcing but we simply do not have enough police to take on those layered duties.

I do not believe the community is being unfair or misjudging the situation when it perceives the significant increase in crime and the deterioration in community safety. The community respects the police; everyone tells me that. They like our police and understand they are doing the best they possibly can, but the community feels that more resourcing is required. May I take my extra 10 minutes, or at least part of it?

MR SPEAKER: Yes, Mr Pratt.

MR PRATT: The lack of funding committed by the Stanhope government to ACT Policing exposes the government’s lack of commitment to the safety and wellbeing of the Canberra community. We have talked before about the concerns people have about the 131 444 call centre service. That is just another example of the problem we have with policing capacity. We have talked before about the need to have a stronger police presence, with more police officers providing a preventative capability. We have talked before about the deterioration of the mounted police unit and the running down of that force. We have talked before about promises by the government to introduce bicycle patrols and other community-level policing patrols but they have not materialised.

I remind members of Commissioner Keelty’s comments the week before last. The government put forward an argument that it cannot find out how many police it has on a given day because it does not know where they are. Commissioner Keelty’s response was: “The ACT government gets the police that it pays for.” So, he is saying the ACT government clearly ought to know what it has available to it. If he is wrong, I will stand corrected as well. That is what he said, and I would like to hear the argument against that comment.

I will finish my comments there. The picture we portray of the funding and the inability to come to grips with criminal activities indicate that something is wrong in our policing unit capability, and I hope the appropriation does something to address it.

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