Page 2755 - Week 09 - Thursday, 27 September 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Last month, after night-time rock-throwing attacks on the 394 and nearby routes, two buses were painted by local teenagers.
One had a beach theme, to reflect Maroubra, and the other an indigenous motif for the teenagers at La Perouse. Since the buses started running, there have been no more attacks.
So perhaps at the root of this problem is social inclusion and the ability for all citizens to feel like they are part of the community. Indeed, the crime manager at the Maroubra police station said:
We’ve been told by some of our high risk youth offenders that those buses will be left alone.
So there is one interesting solution, and perhaps it is about having buses that have different colour schemes and paint schemes on them so that people feel some ownership of them, rather than seeing them as just simply a target.
The responses around Australia have varied. Mr Pratt spoke about what is going on at Taree—at Taree they had a particular place; so some of their strategies are targeted at how you would look at securing a particular place. It includes things like sending out patrols two times a week to remove rocks and loose objects, planting of low-lying shrubs, trimming the bases of trees for better visibility and denying people a place to hide, and planting of thorny ground covers to make it hard for people to get to those places. So there are some ideas, Mr Hargreaves, that you could, through your TAMS portfolio, ensure happened if, when we look at the data, there are areas that have a prevalence of this. We all acknowledge that this can be very random.
In the Northern Territory, they have had a different approach. They have had a couple of operations—Operation Tigress and Operation Hurricane—but they involved youth workers. They made sure that the youth workers were involved—police and youth workers covering both sides of the coin. They targeted during school holidays, they analysed the data and asked, “When is it likely to occur? Where is it likely to occur? Let’s make sure that we cover it properly.” The Northern Territory actually used night vision goggles, so the thought of ACTION bus drivers or the AFP wearing night vision goggles in the ACT is a bit interesting, but if that is what is required then let us do it.
The WA government have had a massive crackdown on all sorts of crimes on buses. In their anti rock throwing campaign they sent out the very strong message that they were going to use DNA to catch offenders. Indeed, if members are interested, the adverts that they put out had things on it like “DNA is solving crime on buses”, and instead of having the route number on the bus that is in the picture, it had “DNA LAB”, giving the idea of a mobile DNA lab. Another says, “Violence towards bus drivers stops right here.” But it is the police, it is the community and it is the authorities working together to make sure that it happens. So there is a different approach again, for the interest of Mr Hargreaves.
The point here is that we have a problem; we have a problem that has been going on for some time. We now have a solid initiative on the table from Mr Corbell, which is
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .