Page 1494 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 May 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
released on 6 June. Mr Speaker, for all of those reasons, the government does not support the simplistic and ill-informed motion moved by Mr Pratt today.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (4.57): I thank Mr Pratt for his motion, which I will be supporting. Monday’s editorial in the Canberra Times pretty much summed up most of the concerns that the ACT Greens have been raising over the last six months about ACT Policing. It is interesting that today the minister chose to focus in 99 per cent of his speech on police numbers, whereas this is not the action part of the motion. A call for the tabling of documents is, and it is that part of the motion that I support and speak in favour of today.
The ACT government spends some $95 million on policing each year and we are entitled to wonder—indeed, it is our duty to investigate—whether the ACT government is spending this money in an efficient and effective manner. But this is very difficult when the ACT government hides key information about ACT Policing’s performance. Therefore, I am supporting Mr Pratt’s motion requesting the ACT government to release key information pertaining ACT Policing’s capability and the police agreement renegotiation.
The ACT Policing study is a good example of a document the public deserves to see but the ACT government has been hiding. The study was set up in 2004 to look at the capacity of ACT Policing to meet its objectives but it has been hidden under cabinet consideration for around 11 months. The previous minister for policing refused on many occasions to release this report. Thankfully, the new minister has made a public promise to release the report after the next budget. But this will be some two years after the report commenced, making it difficult to judge the currency and utility of the data.
The ACT Policing annual report was pretty much a heavily spun publicity piece that skewed the interpretation of data and tried to fool the public with its emphasis on positives and its window-dressing to hide any shortcomings. Take, for example, data provided showing a falling community confidence in policing. The annual report described this data as “encouraging”, simply because the level of confidence was still ahead of some other states and territories. I thought I just heard the minister say that we should not be comparing certain data with other states and territories and yet he chose this interpretation in ACT Policing’s annual report in order to give himself a positive spin. Should not ACT Policing, rather, be showing concern for the fall in confidence and describing how it will seek to address this problem?
Let me give another instance. Operation Halite is lauded as a great success and yet the annual report fails to identify a link between the conduct and diversion of resources into Operation Halite—which focused on burglary and stolen motor vehicles—and the decrease in the crimes against property apprehension rate. How can Operation Halite be deemed a great success if the apprehension rate has fallen? And why does the ACT government continue to place a publicly positive spin on this, rather than acknowledging the facts and seeking ways to improve? Mr Speaker, I thought data was really the way to do this.
Then there is the failure to adequately report the number and type of complaints being made against ACT Policing. At a time when police are to be given more powers, including the use of force against people who may be entirely innocent of any crime, we
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .