Page 1698 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 1 April 2009
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Anna Bligh. She essentially said that she did not want New South Wales laws to result in bikies going over the border to Queensland. She immediately sensed the ramifications of New South Wales acting and Queensland not acting.
It is perhaps even more important in relation to the ACT. Mrs Dunne has gone through the South Australian legislation without the hysteria, and I think she has quite rightly said that, while she does not endorse necessarily the South Australian legislation, aspects of it are worth looking at.
What New South Wales does is worth looking at from a number of perspectives. Certainly, we can always learn from other jurisdictions in terms of what they do. But the important point that has been made by Mr Hanson is that it will affect us. What happens in New South Wales will affect us. We cannot simply block our ears and pretend that there is no organised crime problem in the ACT.
We do not overstate the issue when we say that we are touched by organised crime. We can debate how extensive that is and how significant that is, but when we consider the incidents of bikie violence around the nation and look also at the tragic shootings here in the ACT it gives us cause for concern.
It is important to respond in a sensible way. The minister’s original approach was that there is not a problem; there is nothing to see here; we don’t have a bikie problem and therefore we do not need to bother about toughening up our legislation. The opposition is very pleased that he has now responded to some of the community concern which has been evident by shifting his rhetoric somewhat. We cannot pretend that we do not have any problems with bikies. We cannot pretend that we do not have problems with organised crime.
Fundamentally, we are talking about a problem with organised crime. It has little to do with motorbikes. Motorbikes just happen to be the way that a number of these groups around the nation identify. Fundamentally, it is a problem of organised crime and all of the associated social ills that go with that. It really matters little whether they are riding a bike or not. We need to make it fundamentally clear as well that most Canberrans who ride motorcycles have nothing to do with outlaw motorcycle gangs. This is an organised crime issue, and we cannot simply bury our heads in the sand about this.
Mr Hanson’s motion calls on us to start moving to look at what we as a jurisdiction need to do to respond. The constant refrain from the Attorney-General is that we cannot have knee-jerk reactions. No one in the ACT that I know of is calling for knee-jerk reactions. The Liberal Party is not calling for knee-jerk reactions. I have not heard Mr Hanson in any of his statements say that we need to act right now to pass legislation to respond to this issue. What he is saying is that we do need to get moving on it, that there is a sense of urgency.
One needs to ask the question why it takes incidents like the incident at Sydney airport before governments actually act. The intelligence is there. It should not need a public event where someone dies in a brawl for a government to act. I think there would be a lot of people in the community who would be asking why it is that it
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