Page 289 - Week 01 - Thursday, 14 February 2008
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We also need to acknowledge the efforts made by groups—apart from ACT Policing—who, against all the odds, continue to run Neighbourhood Watch programs and all the other more informal groups that are set up at neighbourhood levels to work towards making Canberra safe. We have to remember that suburbs are empty during the day, because now everybody goes out: children go to school; fathers go to work as they used to; and mothers go to work as they used not to. We can have whole empty streets apart from the elderly. It does not help the elderly to feel secure if they know that there is nobody within call if something does happen.
The ACT government has a strategy—the ACT property crime reduction strategy: building a safer community—which I assume still informs government policy on these matters. It lists a variety of facts and statistics about burglary and motor vehicle theft in the ACT and describes mechanisms that the government plans to use to address property crime. The vision statement in this document is:
A safer Canberra through a collaborative effort to reduce burglaries by 10% and motor vehicle theft by 25% by 31 December 2007.
We have had December 2007 but I am not sure where the evaluation of that strategy is. Have these reductions occurred? Is a review of the strategy occurring?
Mr Corbell: I have just told you that.
DR FOSKEY: Sorry, I guess I was not listening as closely as I might. I am interested to know whether we have had a document tabled.
Mr Corbell: I just gave you the stats.
DR FOSKEY: I would expect that we would see a document tabled, because it is a strategy which was, I expect, in 2004 perhaps part of the promise for this term of government.
Ongoing support for this document was mentioned in the June 2007 review of the Canberra social plan, along with government commitments to extra funding for new police officers, higher police visibility, increased priority response by police, improving road safety and enhancing the child sex offender register team. Many of these measures are occurring. We need to follow up the data on their implementation and the level of success.
This strategy mentioned that a relatively small group of recidivist offenders is responsible for the majority of offences. I was president at a Weston Creek Community Council meeting a couple of years ago where a policeman making a presentation said exactly that. He indicated that a very large number of crimes are committed by the same group of people; he felt that he could probably name them. I always think it is interesting when we have this amount of information but we cannot, apparently, do anything about the situation.
I happened, fortuitously, to be in the library at lunchtime. I found a report, Breaking the cycle, produced by the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission in 2007. It
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