Page 809 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 20 March 2019
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Wales have been amended, and those amendments, following the Ombudsman’s report, have been incorporated into our laws and provide exclusions for young people; for people consorting with family members; for people consorting in the workplace; and training and education; and, specifically, for Aboriginal kinship groups. That has been ignored. They are talking about laws in another jurisdiction that have been subsequently amended. They are using old laws in another jurisdiction to critique the laws in front of them. When Mrs Jones raised that point, Minister Stephen-Smith looked bemused. She did not know that that was in these laws that have been tabled and that we are debating today.
We have experts, and I will be quoting from them. Our experts are on the front line of territory policing. They are people like Rudi Lammers, the former Chief Police Officer; Justine Saunders, the former Chief Police Officer; Angela Smith, the Australian Federal Police Association president, who represents all of our police across the territory; and a former Attorney-General, Simon Corbell. I would rather take advice and expert opinion from those directly associated with fighting crime in our suburbs than from bikies, as Mr Rattenbury has, and from a Queensland academic, which is all that Mr Ramsay could pull out.
They have made much of human rights. They are saying, “We cannot possibly support this because of human rights.” I remind members that the last time I brought a bill into this place to deal with this, the criminal control order bill, it was deemed human rights compliant by the Human Rights Commission. The Human Rights Commission described it as the best legislation of its sort in the country, and the Labor Party and the Greens still rejected it. They are hiding behind this myth of human rights or trying to say that it is not going to be effective. Ask women being shot in Richardson whether they think the current laws are effective or not; they might give you a straight answer.
Fundamentally, the most illustrative contribution to the debate was from Ms Cody. Ms Cody’s response was, “In terms of these laws, yeah, nah.” That was her quote. That was her opinion, her view: “Yeah, nah.” That is the Labor Party’s position, because that is what Labor ministers and Labor members are told their position is by the factions in the unions: “Go in there. We don’t care what you say. We really do not care if you are quoting from bikies or from Queensland academics; your position is ‘Yeah, nah.’ That is your position.”
Mr Gentleman said that the Labor Party had a budget and the Liberal Party voted against it. There are many reasons why we voted against that budget, but if he wants to restore the $15 million that the Labor Party ripped out of the police budget and bring that back as a separate line in the budget, I am sure we would support it. Feel free to bring the police budget in as a separate line item, with the $15 million restored that you ripped out, and then let us have that debate. They will not do that. They will not do that because they are not supporting our police. This is the party that does not trust our police. They think they will abuse these laws. They said as much: that the police will abuse these laws. This is the party and the government that ripped $15 million of funding out of the budget.
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