Page 2537 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 August 2007
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crime and custodial responses to drug-related, medical and social problems. A number of the government’s crime prevention strategies and diversionary programs are paying dividends in reducing recidivism rates amongst their target demographics. We welcome the move to make circle sentencing and other diversionary programs available for a broader range of potential subjects. These programs require a large commitment of up-front resources but I hear almost uniformly positive feedback about them. I urge the government to invest more resources into them and to extend their range, because they have been proven to pay dividends over the long term.
Another area which receives pitiful little attention and funding is support for detainees once they have been released from jail. This is when they are at their most vulnerable and when many people struggle to avoid falling back into old crowds and old habits. There is no point in having a state-of-the-art prison if we are sending someone onto the streets stigmatised, homeless and broke. That is a very good way of keeping recidivism rates high. Education, accommodation and employment schemes for released prisoners should be a high priority for the government and would surely result in lower long-term costs to society in the future.
This budget does not adequately address that need for the greater resources that would be required to various community organisations to plan for and meet the expected increase in demand for their services generated by their involvement in the Alexander McConochie project. Of course, I welcome the extra funding for additional police officers in this year’s budget. ACT Policing has been inadequately staffed for some time and that has diminished their ability to respond to less urgent matters. I generally welcome the minister’s directions to the AFP to increase visibility in community policing though I am concerned that the minister rejected the Cameron report’s recommendation about police car chases. I also welcome the minister’s announcement of legislative changes to the sexual assault laws to ease the burden on victims being subjected to excessive cross-examination. The conviction rate for sexual assaults is far too low. I recognise that it is uniformly low across jurisdictions but this should not be the benchmark that we aim to reach.
Last year’s ACT policing annual report again featured far too high a level of political and media spin and did not sufficiently account for either internal or public complaints against the police. The minister said he would look at reformatting the annual reporting of complaints against police to make it more transparent. I welcome his commitment. I note that at the time the legal affairs committee produced its report into police methods of crowd control, the capsicum spray incident which caused us to call for that inquiry still had not been resolved. That was coming up to four years later.
There is more funding for volunteer fire fighters’ equipment in this budget. I am gladdened by the positive reception that the budget received from our underappreciated volunteer force. Of course there is always a lot of rhetorical support for the rural fire service and many members of this place like to assert that they are the RFS’s real best friends. Of course, some are volunteers. But the recent dramatic demonstration outside the Assembly, the high level of disquiet with the administrative structure and the behaviour of the new commissioner are evidence that people on the ground do have their views on these matters, and these views differ from the government’s. Yet again—this time from the volunteer firies—we heard the now familiar refrain which could become the epitaph of this government: we weren’t
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