Page 3481 - Week 08 - Thursday, 23 August 2012
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low grade infringements, which are a more than a nuisance and are terrible for the neighbourhood. The provisions Mr Stefaniak proposed some years ago in relation to on-the-spot fines, and which the government decided in its wisdom not to support, would have assisted police in these matters. The police are powerless in many ways to deal with them, and the minister shows no interest in helping the police address these issues.
It means that it is a very hard place to live if you have an unruly neighbour that you cannot do anything about. The police do not have the powers to do anything about it, and it is a living hell for people in my electorate and people across the territory when they have long, ongoing and dreadful neighbourhood disputes. The police need the power to deal with this, and they also need to be tasked by the minister to deal with these things.
What we have with the administration of the justice portfolio by Simon Corbell is a series of lost opportunities. He went to the last election with a promise of a unified court and better budgeting and he was going to play hell with a stick. But he came in and the first thing he did was to move away from his proposal for a unified court and come up with a virtual district court. That was such a dud policy that he could not find anyone—not one person, not even anyone in the Labor lawyers—who could come up with a good word for his policy, and he eventually had to abandon it because it was such a dud. Since then we have had stopgap, piecemeal attempts to fix up the court system. Even today, after all the money that has been spent on the blitz, we have made almost no inroads into the unconscionable waiting times to have criminal matters listed.
MR HANSON (Molonglo) (9.54): Mrs Dunne set me up with my segue for police, so I will go there before I talk about corrections. Indeed, it is the case that our police are not well supported by this government. We have an outstanding police force. It is well led, it is well disciplined, it is well trained. We are lucky to have the police force that we have, but they have ongoing frustrations. A classic example of that is the revolving door of bail. We have talked about that in this Assembly previously, but this is a government that, rather than supporting its police force, has decided to enact a framework of legislation that puts emphasis on a balance that favours those who perpetrate crime rather than the victims of crime or those in the community trying to look after us and prevent crime.
Having said that, I think that we get reasonably good value for money from our police force, and this might be one area of the budget where we would agree with the government that the amount appropriated is getting us a good result. It is quite clearly the case there is more the government could do to support the police, but I think that the appropriation amount is appropriate.
The police are out right now in Civic as we speak, and they will be out there tomorrow night and the night after. They face danger and they face threat. There is violence in Civic; we know that. On some nights that violence reaches unacceptable levels. The Canberra Liberals have done what we can to support the police from opposition. Mr Seselja proposed legislation that would have provided additional protections for police. The police assaults legislation provided a framework where, if
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