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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (15 February) . . Page.. 6 ..

MR OSBORNE (continuing):

from the Assembly later this week for the Justice Committee to inquire into the adequacy of certain aspects of our policing and police force. I will discuss the details of that inquiry in more detail on Thursday.

The other police-related matter, the shooting gallery, sparked a couple of interesting discussions - one with the Acting Chief Police Officer, Denis McDermott, and the other with the Director of Public Prosecutions, Richard Refshauge. Both indicated that the successful operation - and I use those words reservedly - of the shooting gallery is far from assured. The police made it very clear to the committee that if they considered a person was committing a drug offence, regardless of where they were in the city, then their officers would be acting to make an arrest.

The DPP informed the committee that, in his opinion, and in hindsight, the model which was passed by the Assembly last year was very much the second best option and that the day-to-day operation of this place had a lot of problems - something to do with the AFP being directly accountable to the Commonwealth rather than the ACT.

Now that the AFP Commissioner, Mick Palmer, has publicly changed his mind about shooting galleries and has attacked their establishment, describing them as unsafe, bad policy, not in Australia's best interests, and a trendy quick fix in response to emotional appeals, it might be a good time for members to rethink setting one up here in Canberra.

A further area of interest among the annual reports examined by the committee was the operation of the criminal injuries compensation scheme. The committee was impressed with the quality of the information provided in the report but disappointed with how much money had been recovered from perpetrators. While some States have far better and improving rates of recovery from perpetrators, the ACT last year recovered just $540 out of a total payout of over $6.6m, or collected $8 per $100,000 paid out. The committee believes that this is an area worth addressing by the Government, as even an improvement to the recovery rate of New South Wales, 3 per cent, would have recovered around $200,000.

Finally, the committee was very interested in the operation of the Legal Aid Commission and indicated in the report its intention later this year to initiate an inquiry into the adequacy of funds for legal aid. The committee noted that almost $500,000 of legal aid funds will be spent on representation relating to the failed hospital implosion and recommended that the Government make available additional information regarding the number of people who have received funding, the amounts for each person and, within the strict bounds of privacy, whether they were private citizens or public officials.

I thank all members on the committee for their assistance in this report, and also our secretary, Fiona, for her time.

Question resolved in the affirmative.

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