Page 5138 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 27 October 2010
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MR HANSON: There is a further Green amendment that is coming forward. I foreshadow we will not be supporting that amendment. I am comfortable with the government’s amendment on this and the approach that has been taken. I think I understand the approach that you are trying to take with your amendments but I am satisfied that the information that is being sought will be provided to us.
It is also important to say up-front that we have every confidence in ACT Policing. I think that point has been made by all three parties here now. I am also confident that the decision that has been put forward for any recommendation by Roman Quaedvlieg, the Chief Police Officer, to the minister will be a considered one and certainly in the best interests of the ACT community.
With regard to the Greens’ motion, there are aspects of it that I think explain why we will not be supporting it. Certainly, there was an incident in WA that I think is of concern to everybody. Nobody obviously supports what occurred in WA. Everyone is disturbed by it. ACT Policing certainly has the benefit of the experience of what occurred in WA and the lessons learnt from that incident. I quote Chief Police Officer Roman Quaedvlieg, who condemned the incident in WA, from the Canberra Times of 16 October 2010. He said:
There’s universal condemnation of the images we’ve seen out of Western Australia, that was … an abuse of authority.
So this is not something that we would expect to be in any way condoned if there were to be an expansion of tasers in the ACT. I think those words from the Chief Police Officer—indeed, the words from the minister, from myself and from the Greens—make it very clear that that is not acceptable and that is not what would be expected. There are recommendations that have been accepted also by the Western Australia Police Service. They have also condemned what has occurred.
It is interesting and relevant to note that the rate of injuries to police, as reported in the Western Australian report, is not as clear as the Greens have made out. I will quote the WA Police Commissioner, Karl O’Callaghan, who said in a recent Insight program: “The Corruption and Crime Commission report didn’t say that injuries had increased but said that assaults on police had increased. We have heard from John Graves”—he is a WA police sergeant—“that injuries occur to police all the time in the difficult situation where they are grappling with people. Injuries to police have gone down, assaults on police have gone up. That is the thing the commission focused on, assaults. It did not look at the injuries.”
There are a lot of positive stories, I think, that need to be told about tasers. You cannot simply focus on the negatives when it comes to looking at tasers. The report did find that the taser had been used contrary to WA police policy in this instance. In fact, there had been a few of those incidents but they have been addressed. The officers involved had been disciplined and there have been external and internal reviews of procedures.
The Greens’ motion essentially also calls on the decision to be made by the Assembly rather than by the minister and the police. That requirement has been waived in the
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