Page 2703 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 10 August 2016
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When the government announced money to be put in the budget I do not think there was anyone out there in the community saying that that should not be done. To then hypothecate it to rates has actually had a perverse effect out there in community and turned this into a debate about, “Was this a tax grab? Was this just a way of hiding a rates increase?” And so on. I do not think it has played out the way the government intended. I do not think it has actually helped the debate.
From the Canberra Liberals’ perspective I do not think it is the right way to go. This is an area that we will look to, not with a view to reducing any funding effort but to make sure that the community maintains its support for this important area and does not let the niggle of this “rates rise by stealth”, as it has been described to me, stop that enjoying broad, unanimous, bipartisan, community support.
There are a lot of areas of JACS that deal with family and community violence: the DPP, the Victims of Crime Commissioner, of course the police, the court system, Legal Aid and so on. All of them work very hard and I commend the staff for that. It is a very complex and difficult area of law.
An area, perhaps, where we have not seen quite so closely eye-to-eye—although I think we nearly did—was our response to outlaw motorcycle gangs, bikie activity. We have had recent legislation in this place dealing in part with organised crime activity but we did not get as far as consorting laws. I have been talking in this place about these now for a long time, probably not as long as Mr Corbell but certainly since 2009 when I first became shadow police minister, as Mr Corbell would well know.
At that time Nathan Rees, the then Premier of New South Wales, said he was going to drive the bikies out of New South Wales. He introduced laws to have that effect. There was a denial from this government that this would lead to an increase in activity in the ACT. What we know is that it has. The advice from ACT Policing is that that is exactly what is happening: bikies from New South Wales, in particular Sydney, are coming to the ACT to conduct activities because they can do things here that they cannot do back in New South Wales.
I am speculating a little but I do get that sense that Mr Corbell eventually got to the point where he became a believer, he understood that this was an issue that needed to be dealt with and there was a paper put out, there was consultation and he said he was going ahead with it but he has not fulfilled that obligation. That is disappointing. I do not know quite what happened in the internal machinations of the Labor Party and the cabinet and so on that quite prevented this happening but what I would say is that, regardless of what the reasons were, that is disappointing.
As a result what we will see is continued bikie activity in the ACT that we would not otherwise have, and that does have an impact on community safety and it does have an impact on scarce police resources that are drained away to deal with issues that they would otherwise have more power to prevent. Certainly it would be an increased deterrent for bikies.
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