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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 3 Hansard (6 March) . . Page.. 609 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

stands to reason that you cannot just say, "We have fixed this problem because we have changed the Bail Act." You do need to look at some of the other reasons for the rates of crime.

There are some other issues that you could actually have regard to, say, in relation to the high burglary rate and the fact that there has been a heroin drought. It may be the case that former users of heroin are more inclined today to seek treatment for their addiction. Perhaps they are turning to cheaper drugs and they do not need to be involved in crime to feed particular habits or addictions. There are a range of other reasons.

It is important to understand that there is a range of other reasons before you charge off and introduce measures that may not be relevant. If there is less heroin, if people who are addicted to heroin are more inclined to seek treatment, if they have actually moved on to other substances, if there is no reason for them to engage in as much crime as previously, then those factors need to be taken into account, so that we do not just pass laws willy-nilly.

There has also been a range of other initiatives. The family violence intervention program resulted in a significant improvement in the-

Mr Smyth: Which we did.

MR STANHOPE: Yes, sure, you actually did a bit of lateral thinking. You did not just go charging off saying, "Let's get tough on criminals-let's just lock them all up, particularly on remand, when we are not even sure that they are criminals, and they are only alleged to be criminals. We will lock them up anyway and keep them locked up forever, until we can actually get them into the courts and try them to discover whether indeed they are criminals."

We are doing very significant things here. We are actually now locking up alleged criminals, on remand, as a first response, and leaving them there for a long time. The family violence intervention program is another potential reason for falls in crime rates. These days, property owners are far more inclined-as a result of a scare they received from the previous government, which turned Australia into the burglary and car theft capital of Australia-to take action themselves. They have made their homes far more secure than they did previously.

Some crime rates have decreased since the Bail Act amendments, but others have increased. There have been some other significant increases, and one of the most worrying, in the last year, was the jump in bodily harm offences. In the December quarter, they rose by 42 to 136, the highest ever rate of bodily harm offences recorded in the ACT, recorded last year. That is almost a 25 per cent increase in bodily harm offences in one year. It was a very significant increase.

Of course, crime statistics are very complex, and it is not always easy to draw conclusions from the statistics. It is hard to draw conclusions, and it is hard to get definitive answers. For example, we cannot say whether the 18 people imprisoned for burglary and related offences in the last quarter were recidivist offenders: we simply do not know. However, these are the sorts of claims that are being made. At this stage, we

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