Page 2851 - Week 09 - Thursday, 13 August 2015
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That said, there are a range of areas where I think the government is letting the community down. I turn first to the issue of outlaw motorcycle gangs. This has a history in this place. Indeed, that history dates back to—and you will remember this, Madam Speaker; you were part of this debate—2009 when the then Premier of New South Wales, Nathan Reece, was confronted by escalating bikie violence in New South Wales and implemented laws aimed at tackling the outlaw motorcycle gangs. His intent, his quote, was:
I’m going to drive these bikies out of New South Wales.
Clearly that meant they are going to go somewhere else, and the concern that I had and the concern that others in the community had, including the Australian Crime Commission—and they made similar comments about the South Australian laws—and the Australian Federal Police Association, was: if you implement laws in one place you are going to create displacement of those outlaw motorcycle gangs to another jurisdiction. At that point I echoed the comments from the Australian Federal Police Association that this would mean that the ACT risked becoming an oasis for those bikie gangs.
At the time the government, led by Mr Corbell, flatly said that is not true. He objected to that. And in fact the quote was on 1 April 2009, April Fool’s Day, ironically:
I do not accept the assertion as a given that, because New South Wales legislates in one way, we will be swamped … by bikie gangs from New South Wales.
It was very clear—and we had debates in this place, there were conversations in the media—that what Mr Corbell was saying time and again was: “What happens in New South Wales does not have any impact here in the ACT. Their introducing laws is not going to have an impact on us.” And he rejected those assertions. In the opposition we said, “No. Clearly there will be a correlation. That’s what the experts are saying. Let’s make sure that we legislate in a sympathetic manner so we do not see bikies coming from New South Wales.”
Madam Speaker, what then happened, as you may have followed the debate, was that in estimates this year we followed up on this conversation, on 25 and 26 June, and the minister continued to make his point: “No, it’s not going to have any impact. It will not have any impact.”
Then what happened was that there was a statement in response to a Q&A released by ACT Policing that very day making the explicit point that the laws in New South Wales were having a displacement effect and what was happening because of the fact that there were tough laws in New South Wales and not in the ACT was that bikies were coming from New South Wales into the ACT. In fact, there was a big meeting of the New South Wales Rebels in the ACT that very weekend.
One of the reasons given by ACT Policing that that big group of bikies came from the New South Wales chapter was our laws. They were driven out of New South Wales, came to the ACT—exactly what the Australian Federal Police Association said,
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