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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 11 Hansard (22 October) . . Page.. 3943 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

9A of the Bail Act. Those intense operations like Halite and that particular section have a significant effect on crimes such as burglary because they actually attack repeat offenders.

Ms Dundas prattled on in relation to a number of issues. She talked again about the old red herring: let's address the root causes of crime. Well, you could probably do that until the cows come home, and you are never going to completely solve crime. It is often used, I think, just as an excuse to not do anything, or perhaps to dance around the problem, and to not really get serious in terms of addressing crime. You are never going to get rid of crime, but there is a hell of a lot you can do.

I point out to Ms Dundas, and anyone else who wants to use that excuse about addressing the root causes of crime and not trying to get tough, that in New York Mayor Giuliani, who did a great job out here in terms of drumming up support for the bushfires, actually introduced a zero tolerance program. If people were seen actually committing any sort of criminal act they would be arrested. It was amazing. That often led to convictions for much more serious crimes. The New York crime rate, which was appalling, went down by some 40 per cent as a result.

He probably wasn't addressing the root causes of crime; that takes a hell of a long time, and I am not saying you don't do it. Yes, you do need to do it. But that is a long-term strategy-10, 20, 30 years or more sometimes. You have got to also address what is occurring at the time and take appropriate steps to ensure that you can crack down on crime; you can reduce it; and you can reduce it effectively. New York, I think, showed that very well, as indeed do operations like Halite and indeed section 9A of the Bail Act. Both of those areas are very positive steps which have a real effect of reducing crime, especially certain types of crime. I was pretty disappointed to hear what Ms Dundas was saying.

Then she was going on about police getting people remanded, then getting their act together and actually getting evidence. Then the offenders would be dealt with by a court and maybe jailed again. Ms Dundas, very few people actually get jailed in the territory for anything, which is a cause of concern for, it seems, about 83 per cent of our citizens. I can assure you police just don't operate in that way. More often than not, by the time someone is actually arrested the police have got a pretty reasonable brief at that particular time, and the courts certainly do their best to ensure that people are dealt with as expeditiously as possible. They do that now and they certainly did that during my experience in the courts as a prosecutor and indeed working with the defence.

I don't think you could ever accuse either the police or indeed the courts of letting people languish in custody, certainly whilst on remand, waiting for a case to be dealt with, waiting for people to get evidence together. That quite clearly does not happen, and you really need to check your facts there.

Mr Wood again made this cheap, glib comment about an animal-led police recovery. He spent a lot of time talking about it being much better having police come there in cars, getting there quickly. Yes, they can, but there is a real problem when police are really stretched, when police are asked to come in on overtime-and that has often occurred in the past but now we are finding police officers are just unable to even come in and do

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