Page 3033 - Week 08 - Thursday, 15 August 2019
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government that number has fallen to just 643—a cut of 75 front-line officers compared to the beginning of the decade—while the population has grown by more than 50,000. This is proof of the government’s lack of commitment to our police force.
We have seen many areas of crime increasing, most notably the continued ram raids targeting local and family businesses. This is a growing concern in the community and is having a huge impact on many businesses. Family businesses are forced to pay tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars to repair their businesses. Even businesses that have not been the victims of crime are having to invest more and more money, which they do not have, in additional security measures because of this concern.
The government constantly praise the strong growth in Canberra’s population but they seem to conveniently forget that is growing when it comes to funding our police. As our population continues to grow, workloads for our police continue to increase. Funding, as per this budget, has failed to keep up with inflation, population growth and workloads.
Let us take a look at Gungahlin Police Station as an example. Gungahlin station is one of the many areas of policing infrastructure that is not fit for purpose. The population in Gungahlin has, quite as expected, skyrocketed, something absolutely expected and predicted, while the police infrastructure has stagnated. There are now over 70,000 residents in the area. There is little to no capacity for officers to conduct soft interviewing of victims of domestic or sexual violence. Nor is there a break-out or lunch room. There is not room for additional personnel to be rostered at this station; it is just too small. When they flush the toilet, everyone in the station can hear.
The government’s approach to dealing with capacity issues at Gungahlin is to issue them with smart phones so that they can do more work in public places. While that may have its uses it is not a solution to the issue of staffing. Indeed it raises other concerns about personal time management and how we manage the stress that our staff experience.
On emergency services, the ACT government has failed to support front-line emergency service personnel and provide them with appropriate resources and equipment. Paramedics have suffered years of chronic understaffing, with up to 41.5 per cent of shifts under this minister falling below minimum crewing, while firefighters are left with ageing equipment and inadequate training and support.
The government has spruiked that it will hire additional firefighters over two recruitment colleges but confirmed in estimates that this is simply to try to get the workforce back up to the funded establishment, something that it should already be achieving, making the announcement somewhat misleading.
The government finally appears to be taking some action on acquiring additional aerial firefighting appliances. The issue-plagued and frequently unavailable Bronto, Canberra’s only high-rise firefighting truck, has been unavailable much of the time. It has meant that firefighters were forced to carry extinguishers and hoses up 12 floors to respond to an apartment building site fire earlier this year. The Bronto has been
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