Page 1252 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 30 May 2007

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been injured in recent weeks in assaults. There have been six major incidents—violent incidents—at Woden interchange alone. In response to a question on notice, I got an indication that there have been at least four ACTION staff injured this year, 2007, although that does not quite sit with other information that I have.

Disturbingly, too, I notice that, commensurate with this increasing violence in bus interchanges, there is constant concern by members of the public and ACTION staff that they do not see a police presence in the interchanges. They wish to see more of a police presence. They also wish to see a more targeted, perhaps undercover, operation, to see if people can be apprehended who are religiously and regularly hanging around interchanges begging for money, which then leads to intimidation, which then leads to theft when these things do not occur.

Let me mention a couple of answers I got in response to a question on notice about this particular area. I asked:

How many assaults on passengers and/or ACTION staff have been reported in 2007 to date …

It is interesting to see that in the answer four staff are identified, but nobody has any detail on or data for the number of passengers. I find it disturbing that ACTION cannot tell us, and does not know, the number of passengers who may have been hurt in reportable incidents.

Another question was:

The answer was:

This information is not provided to, or kept, by ACTION.

I find this rather peculiar. Why have the police not provided that information to ACTION? If ACTION supposedly collects, from the transport officers at each interchange, on a daily basis, the number of incidents and data about incidents which have occurred, why do they not know the outcome? Why do they not know the outcome of police action or court action? And so on.

If I had time, I would read a few more questions and give you a number of answers which indicate the same sort of pattern. I will leapfrog down to the last one:

What are the details of police call out assistance and routine patrol arrangements that currently exist between ACTION and ACT Policing for each interchange.

The answer states:

Police attend through the normal procedures of being notified … Routine patrol arrangements are a matter for Police.

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