Page 5165 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 27 October 2010
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The question I have for Mr Hanson is: how do tasers differ from random drug swipes? Why does one warrant Assembly debate and not the other? They are both part of the police arsenal. They are both about what might be described as operational matters; yet road testing warranted an entire piece of legislation before the Assembly and tasers did not.
Of course, the obvious and technical answer to that is that we had to create legislation to allow drug-driving tests. But the point is, in effect, these are both matters about expanding the operational capabilities of the police. I think it is a shame that we are not even prepared to accept that the Assembly should be involved in the decision making around the implementation of a significant new weapon in the police arsenal.
I would like to come to a few of the comments made by the Attorney-General and would like to reflect on the importance of transparency when it comes to the use of force by the police in the ACT. My motion seeks to have the Assembly take note of this fact:
… that increasing transparency relating to the use of force employed by police has the potential to reduce public scepticism of police and increase public confidence in law enforcement …
Put simply, the public trusts the police force and a government that are open and accountable and, conversely, the public does not trust one that is closed and secretive. That is something to be guarded against at all costs. Yet the government, by their amendment, would have the Assembly strike out the reference to transparency. It is important to note that that quote that is in my motion, and I have just quoted it again, and that the government seeks to strike out is not some random quote plucked from obscurity to add weight to the Greens’ motion or is simply text that we made up. It is a quote from the 2008 government response to the use of force inquiry. It was a government response signed by the same minister for police who today will have the Assembly delete the reference from the motion that I have put before the chamber. In that case, the minister is being transparent and we can see right through him because he is believing his own words. But that is not the type of transparency that we are after.
There can be no claim of mistake about this because yesterday my office circulated to both the attorney’s office and the opposition spokesperson’s office the exact reference for the quote. And for the benefit of Hansard, it is page 35 of the 2008 government response to the police powers of crowd control inquiry.
Let me finally comment, on the issue of an Assembly debate, that discussion about thresholds for the use of force is important. As I said earlier, it is entirely appropriate that the Assembly debate when the threshold has escalated to the point at which an officer is entitled to use a taser. I think it is a fundamental question of policy.
Earlier in the discussion, Mr Corbell made a comment that I had spoken about a Western Australia incident. He noted that that was another jurisdiction, that he condemned it and that the police force in the ACT condemned it. He then made,
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