Page 1393 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2006
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levels, the figures are alarming, although no more alarming than for the rest of the country measured over the same time periods.
The fact is that, as justice has become administered in a more increasingly liberal way in the last few decades, generally standards of criminality and social behaviour have deteriorated. You do not need statistics to tell you that. Aggressive, sometimes drug-induced, armed hold-ups with serious injuries and even death are, pro rata, a much more accepted feature on the ACT landscape than they were, say, 15 years ago. Drug-induced psychosis and consequential violent crime features, pro rata, much more strongly on the Canberran landscape than it perhaps did 10 and certainly 15 years ago. That is certainly the assessment of older, experienced policemen.
This general deterioration is often put down to changing social standards, systems, attitudes and opportunities. Yet I would say that, while we have become more sophisticated over 30 years as a society—for example, I think we would all agree, thank God, that general domestic violence related injustice and discrimination has changed for the better—conversely, it appears that the incidence of very violent and murderous behaviour has clearly increased.
In my view, the justice system, while making excellent inroads in areas of traditional social injustice and helping to liberate many in society, has forgotten to keep up with the extreme elements of society who behave even more extremely than was the case two or more decades ago. I put it to you that parallelling this slide in justice standards, which has allowed the growth of more extreme—or at least intense—behaviour, we have seen the slide in police power.
As I said, it is all very nice to develop a more libertarian society where we can reduce some of the constraints on society, and to think that, as a much more sophisticated society, everybody is becoming more reasonable, everybody is becoming more educated and everybody is becoming fairer and more understanding of his or her fellow man and woman. But the sad reality is that this is bunkum.
Our police forces—indeed, those across the new, sophisticated Western world—have for the most part lost the power and the respect they once held. The judicial systems across our societies have really taken away the power and the respect, and the ability to respond quickly in support of the broader community, that that our police services once had. As a consequence, the police have become the punching bags of judicial systems around the world. Canberra is not isolated in that respect; I am not singling out Canberra as being criminal.
On a more local level, it has been publicised recently that police in the ACT do not have sufficient resources to arrest people and bring them before the courts in a timely fashion. This issue was raised again following a court case where Chief Justice Terence Higgins said he had been told that police do not have sufficient resources to arrest people and how it was strange that a burglary offender from 1999 had only now been brought before the courts, seven years later. I quote from the Canberra Times on that particular incident.
A large part of the reason cases like this one were delayed was a lack of manpower to complete paperwork and make arrests. The ACT community and the judicial system clearly cannot wait years for a relatively simple case to finally be brought to court. It is
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