Page 3578 - Week 11 - Thursday, 22 September 2005
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Next there is ACT policing. It apparently goes against the grain of this government’s philosophy to properly protect the community against crime. Again, an unbalanced obsession with human rights dictates a soft-on-crime attitude that sees the running down of ACT police numbers and the erosion of police capacity to properly do the job they wish to do. Numbers in the ACT police force are well below the Australian average. I have gone through that a number of times. In fact, there has been no effective increase in police numbers since 2001. The claim by the government that they have increased police numbers since 2001 was exposed as folly in the recent estimates. The number of sworn police officers in the ACT has dropped by 14, at the same time as the population has grown.
The police minister, Mr Hargreaves, defends the position, arguing that it is all about intelligence-based policing. It is not good enough when the police cannot even engage in intelligence-based policing because there are not enough of them to engage regularly with the community to gather intelligence. In fact, we hear report after report from members of the public of the police being unable to respond to incidents due to a lack of available police to do the job. We continue to receive complaints on a daily basis.
We hear the Chief Minister rattling off declining statistics of serious crime, and these are encouraging. A number of major crime activities have decreased significantly. This is due mainly to taskforce policing—targeted policing—which is effective policing, but we see a massive imbalance. Low to medium level crime increases elsewhere due to a lack of police presence in other areas. We call this the plunger effect. I remind you of the 22-odd armed robberies that occurred in the space of just three weeks earlier this year. Unfortunately, this pattern continues.
The road traffic statistics also highlight the problem. Our current road death toll of 20 is over twice that of the whole previous year. There is an increasing percentage of positive random breath tests from the lowest number of random breath tests carried out in five years. These statistics further illustrate that, while incidents of unsafe practices on roads continue to rise, police capacity to carry out random breath tests declines. Through the latest Auditor-General’s report into administration of the courts, we have magistrates claiming that the severe court delays are likely to be due to a lack of police resources. The police minister must explain to the community why he has allowed the police force to be so underresourced that it neither can respond to crime nor has the capacity to progress law enforcement through the courts.
The government’s failings are starkly demonstrated by the recent discovery that badly needed closed circuit television cameras in Civic were not working, and that systemic failures had gone undetected for some days. While initially stating that he would prefer more police on our streets to additional CCTV cameras, the Chief Minister also stated that he feels the cameras are something the government must urgently review and that their implementation on all ACTION bus services, as well as across the territory, is imminent.
In contrast to this note of urgency by the Chief Minister it is disturbing to note that, during estimates hearings, Simon Corbell, the minister for transport, stated that the implementation of cameras on older ACTION buses would only be considered in future years, as the government has been unable to find the resources to do so this coming year.
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