Page 2344 - Week 06 - Friday, 27 June 2008
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
perceptions of safety in the community. For the first time CCTV will be rolled out to include our existing entertainment districts, our nightspot districts, in Manuka and Kingston, as well as an expansion, an upgrade, in the city centre itself and at areas of mass gathering such as Canberra Stadium, Manuka Oval and Exhibition Park in Mitchell. These are all very important expansions.
I will respond to the comments made by Dr Foskey when she asserted that CCTV does not improve community safety. There is no doubt that if you just put the cameras in and do not use them in a proactive way their relative usefulness declines very quickly. But where you actively use them through active monitoring, which is what the government has committed to do, and where you do it in conjunction with other people who have an interest in public safety in the precincts where they are installed, you can get some real and very positive results.
For example, we want to work very closely with private security staff—for example, bouncers in the nightclub areas—to be able to use the CCTV network to warn them of issues that they need to be looking for in managing private security on private premises. We can use it in conjunction with municipal services staff—for example, city rangers—to deal with issues around vandalism of public property. There is a range of mechanisms that can be used in a very proactive way to help improve safety and security in public places. Of course, the most important thing is to ensure that they are used proactively by our police services when it comes to responding to incidents as they occur, and that is what active monitoring will be all about.
Mr Stefaniak made some comments about lack of investment for technology, data collection and data management in the courts and I would simply draw Mr Stefaniak’s attention to page 245 of budget paper 4, which outlines the significant levels of funding the government is providing for a range of court technology—for example, $454,000 for an upgrade of the court’s case management system; $338,000 for an upgrade of the accident improvement management system in the courts; and $125,000 to do the feasibility study and design on an integrated justice information system. That particularly is the point I think Mr Stefaniak was making—the need to invest in improved data collation, coordination and comparison across different parts of the criminal justice system—and that integrated justice information system is designed to assist us in doing just that. So the government is indeed acting on those issues and I am disappointed that Mr Stefaniak did not pay more attention.
Mr Stefaniak also questioned the need for a new Supreme Court building. The existing building is simply not acceptable; it was built in the sixties, is over 40 years old and it is simply not designed to work as a modern court building needs to work. It takes no account of the security issues that are very important in new court buildings. Mr Speaker, you had to deal with managing security in this building. Well, our courts face very similar problems, except, of course, that they have to deal with witnesses, victims and the accused coming into contact with each other in the courtroom—
MR SPEAKER: We do that here, too.
MR CORBELL: Indeed we do, Mr Speaker. Perhaps the penalties are not as harsh, but nevertheless to some degree that is true. So those issues need to be addressed. We
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .