Page 808 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 20 March 2019
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I will just reiterate the figures that I gave yesterday on the way that ACT Policing and Taskforce Nemesis are approaching this. Criminal gang members charged: in 2018, 27; this year, 13. Offences charged: last year, 78; this year, 27. Search warrants executed: 100 last year, 13 this year. Firearms seized: 20 last year.
ACT Policing continue to do a very good job in dealing with criminal gang activity in the ACT. They have my full support. We would like to see full support from the Canberra Liberals when it comes to budget time.
MR HANSON (Murrumbidgee) (10.59), in reply: I thank people for their contributions, most importantly Mrs Jones, who has been strongly advocating for police since she became the shadow minster, and Mr Wall, whose comments are particularly effective in his electorate down in Brindabella, the people of Tuggeranong.
I also thank those opposite for their comments. They were very illuminating about what really is driving their agenda, what sits behind their refusal to introduce these laws. At the most fundamental level, this is a government and these are ministers who do not trust our police. That is what they were saying today. They were saying, “We do not trust our police. If we give them these powers, we believe that our police are going to abuse these powers.”
We have elements of this legislation that would preclude that from happening, but fundamentally it is a different approach. We support our police; we trust our police; we want to give them the powers that they need on the front line to tackle the insidious scourge of motorcycle gang violence that we are experiencing in Canberra today. We put our police first and we respect our police on the front lines. That is where we are getting our advice from.
I will go to that point and the expert advice that Mr Rattenbury and Mr Ramsay are quoting. We have a Queensland academic and we have bikies. It is like asking the Mafia what they think about organised crime laws. They do not like them? They do not support them? Well, who would have thought that bikies do not like these laws?
Mr Rattenbury, the minister for justice, comes into this place and in part puts the argument that we do not want these laws because the bikies do not like them. Well, that is the whole point of these laws, Madam Assistant Speaker. The bikies do not like them. No, they do not. No, they do not like them. If he had quoted more extensively from the article he quoted from, he would have noticed that it said:
… they believed they would … stop bikies visiting the capital on national runs.
Mr Rattenbury excluded that when he was quoting the bikies. If only he got as passionate and as upset about women being shot in our suburbs as he does when we laugh at him for quoting bikies not liking bikie laws.
We also heard about how this might be applied against vulnerable groups. What the ministers have failed to recognise is that the laws as they are applied in New South
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