Page 1492 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 May 2006
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year 2004-05 the number of police staff for the ACT per 100,000 of the population was 248, whereas the national average was 289. This is a difference of 41 per 100,000 of the population, and when applied to the whole of the population of 323,000 people at that time, this would have equated to 132 staff less than what were on the ACT policing payroll at the time.
As I have indicated previously, the assertion inherent in this motion seems to be that the national average is somehow a clear and undisputed method for measuring police resources in the states and territories. The government does not accept this proposition and we certainly reject the proposition that ACT Policing is short 132 staff as of 30 June 2005.
Indeed, it is worth acknowledging that no government since self-government has ever accepted that the national average be used as the only yardstick to measure need. And this government, too, does not accept that the national average number of police staff per 100,000 is the only way to determine the extent of police resources. How can it be regarded as the only measure for calculating policing needs? The fact that there is such a wide discrepancy of police staff numbers per 100,000 between states suggests that the concept of meeting the national average is not in itself and of itself the only rationale for measuring policing requirements. For example, in 2004-05 the variance between Victoria at 262 police per 100,000 and Northern Territory at 670 was 408 policing staff per 100,000.
So what drives such a statistically significant difference? Could it be that the Northern Territory has a vast geographic area and isolated small pockets of population that require a significant police presence, even if the population is small? And could it be that Victoria, on the other hand, has a highly concentrated population in its major metropolitan area and in several large regional centres? In other words, could it be that both jurisdictions have markedly different policing service needs and the application of a national average does not go anywhere close to assisting them to assess what their needs actually are? And would not that same argument apply here in the ACT—that is, essentially a city state with the majority of its population in the one relatively small geographic area?
So from that, I argue that it is clear that the use of national averages for police staffing raises the question of comparability between jurisdictions. To enable this comparability to be an accurate measure of determining police resources, you have to ask the question: to what extent is the ACT similar or dissimilar to other jurisdictions? It is clear the ACT is different. The Productivity Commission’s national average is based on the police numbers for all jurisdictions. It includes those states and territories which have high ratios of police per population because of—and I just mentioned these reasons—higher dispersed rural populations or those jurisdictions that have highly concentrated populations in large metropolitan areas.
Making comparability even more difficult is the issue of categories of police services provided in other jurisdictions that are not a necessity in the ACT. Some of these services found in other jurisdictions but not in the ACT include police prosecutors. Most jurisdictions employ police prosecutors but not the ACT, where prosecutions are handled by the DPP. Another example is stock squads. Some jurisdictions, such as Queensland, employ police to prevent and investigate stock-related crime in rural areas. There is very
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