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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 3 Hansard (6 March) . . Page.. 619 ..
MS TUCKER (continuing):
particular approach, and were supported by Mr Osborne and Mr Rugendyke, except when they went too far-even for them.
I remember that Mr Osborne's experience as a policeman caused him to support me in an amendment-or maybe he even put it in the end-to wind back one of the proposals that came from the Liberal government, in terms of increasing police responsibility and powers. I think that was trying to take videos out of houses. Is that right? Did that actually get up? I cannot recall the exact issue but I do remember that Mr Osborne's police experience led even him to think this was really not in the interests of the police.
I have certainly been concerned, consistently, in this Assembly about increasing police powers. I do not think it serves either police or community interests. We need to be assisting the police to have good relationships with the community. Increasing their discretion is not necessarily going to do that.
The inexperience of many people in our police force has also come up. These concerns have been expressed by senior police officers. That is just another issue, in terms of what the actual results would be. We need to know whether there would be good results for the community and, particularly, for groups that can be targeted in the community, such as young people, groups of particular ethnic origin and so on. I remember in all those debates we kept hearing from the Liberal government, and quite often the Independents at the time, that there was absolutely no concern that there could be some kind of abuse of discretion by police.
That is laughable. No-one can seriously say that that is not a potential problem. No-one who lives in Canberra and has spoken to people in the Aboriginal community, or to youth groups, can seriously say that there are not abuses of power occurring in this city. Of course there are. That is the nature of any police force. That is why we have to be very careful when we increase powers in any way.
The third point is that we note the Chief Minister's statement over the weekend on sentencing review.
The fourth point is calling on the government to introduce sentencing guidelines. I said initially that I do not fully understand the status of sentencing guidelines or how we would introduce them. I said I will certainly be interested to understand that further. (Extension of time granted.)
Sentencing discretion must ensure that the punishment fits the crime. That is absolutely essential. That is the basic point of sentencing. If we want to ensure that sentencing fits the crime, then we have to look very carefully, if we are going to start making guidelines. We know who we imprison in this society. On the whole, we imprison people who have an issue with drugs, people who have a mental illness, people who are Aboriginal and people who have an intellectual disability. People who are sexually abused as children are highly overrepresented in prisons. This is who we imprison.
Mr Pratt actually said he thought, "Fair enough, you have to have appropriate sentencing, but when people keep doing it, then clearly they must be imprisoned." That is not a logical sequence of thinking. If, in fact, you understand the causes of crime, it is quite
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