Page 1490 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 May 2006
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Hill to Erindale to Richardson range between two and six years. Proactive police patrolling was last seen two, three, four, five or even, in some cases, six years ago.
I know police resources are well stretched. I am confident that the response times to serious crimes are excellent and that police eventually get around to visiting premises affected by non-life threatening criminal behaviour. However, I am speechless that so many shopkeepers would tell me that they do not see police regularly and that relationships do not exist between shopping centres and regional police. I know that that is not the case at the Tuggeranong, Woden and Belconnen shopping centres, and particularly at the Belconnen shopping centre where dedicated beat police patrols occur regularly. But unless shopkeepers are lying to me, that clearly is not the case at the regional and group centre shopping centres.
It has been very clear to me, to existing and to recently retired middle-ranking and more senior police officers that the lack of a routine and regular police presence at group centre and outlying shopping centres reflects the fact that there is not an adequate police presence across the ACT community. If these hubs of community activity cannot attract proactive patrolling and a visible police presence, then the force is demonstrably under strength. Is this a central theme in what has been uncovered in the internal reviews and even perhaps in the Costello functional review itself?
Is this why the internal reviews continue to sit in pending trays months after they should have been finished? Do they confirm the gut feeling of the opposition, the AFPA and retired police officers that ACT Policing is stretched well beyond capacity? I would put it to you that the test of the presence of police in our shopping centres is a litmus test. If, when you go beyond the major shopping centres out into the group centres and then further beyond those, shopkeepers are saying that they rarely see police in a proactive way to gather the intelligence that an intelligence-led police force must have, then I believe that this force is well overstretched and cannot maintain that presence.
It is the feeling of the police association and of retired police who lament the way things were a decade or more ago that proactive policing in areas where the community gathers was important to send a message to people who wanted to behave badly that they had better not do so. They had relationships with shopkeepers and they knew what was going on, not only in those shopping centres but also in the suburbs supported by those shopping centres.
What we want to know here is: what does the Costello functional review say about this? What do the time and motion studies and other internal studies undertaken in the last two or three years say about this question? What do they say the police agreement should look like? What is the minister negotiating with the AFP through the new AFP police agreement in terms of quantifying those capabilities, quantifying those standards and testing that the service we buy is the service we get? Those are the questions the opposition is asking here today.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Minister for Planning) (4.44): Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, the government will not be supporting this motion. To date in the ACT we have been very fortunate that the law and order debate has not been politicised to the degree that we have seen in some other jurisdictions. Unfortunately, from what Mr Pratt has said,
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