Page 942 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 21 April 2021
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I also made the point, and we still hear calls from the community, that we need more policing numbers. We hear it all the time. I quoted yesterday from the president of the Weston Creek Community Council, who has been calling for years for more police.
If you look at the record, you can see that this is not a new phenomenon. As I said, going back to 2012 and 2013, this is a systemic problem that has arisen out of this government’s failure to adequately resource ACT Policing, which means that they are stretched too thin. The warning signs are there. The warnings are coming. They came from the previous AFPA secretary, the current AFPA secretary and members of our community. I will continue to litigate this case, as I have since 2012-13. I will continue to make the case that we need to keep pace with resourcing.
As I said yesterday, the minister can argue that it is okay that we have the lowest number of police in Australia per capita because we are different from New South Wales or we are different from Victoria. He can make that argument. I do not agree with him, but I accept that there is an argument there. What I cannot accept is the actual reduction in police in the ACT, despite our growing population. How is that defensible? We have the police union, their association, crying out because police members are at breaking point. This government—members who have been in this place and who voted for this budget today and voted for previous budgets of this government—is successively cutting the numbers of our police and making their life more and more difficult. As we have seen, response times and clearance rates do not fall where they should be. Community safety is jeopardised as a result of that.
This was the subject of the motion yesterday. I was disappointed that it did not receive support, particularly for the call for a new station in Molonglo Valley. I am disappointed that the local members of Murrumbidgee did not support that. It is clear that that is part of the infrastructure that is needed, part of the resourcing that is needed, in this new area of Canberra.
That station, hopefully, will form part of the strategic review that is now being considered by ACT Policing—as will, no doubt, the capacity of other stations, like the Gungahlin station, which was the subject of a question without notice yesterday. We know it is not fit for purpose because of increased numbers and the requirement to meet the needs of the much larger, and still growing, Gungahlin region. We will continue to argue for increased police resources. We will continue to argue for appropriate facilities to be provided to police so that they can do their job.
We have had some wins over the years with regard to keeping our community safe. Back in 2010—interestingly enough, with the support of the Greens—I was able to get random roadside drug testing introduced in the ACT, despite the opposition of the government of the day, the Labor Party government of the day. However, we have not been successful with some proposals—for example, the calls for anti-consorting laws which would have prevented the bikie war that we have seen break out across Canberra. Indeed, we have seen tragedies occur in recent times.
Despite these being viewed as tired arguments by the police minister, as I said yesterday, we are not tired of making them. We will be tireless in our pursuit of supporting our police and making sure our community is kept safe.
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