Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Australian Crime Commission, I present the committee’s report, incorporating additional comments, entitled Inquiry into the future impact of serious and organised crime on Australian society, together with evidence received by the committee.

Ordered that the report be made a parliamentary paper.

by leave—Again I have the pleasure of acknowledging, at the outset, that this report is the product of a bipartisan committee—in this instance, one on which members of the Senate also served. The chair of the committee, I understand, will be tabling this report shortly in the other chamber.

This report is a substantial reflection on one of the key responsibilities that any community has—that is, effective law enforcement. The breadth of the committee’s report reflects its nature. It is the report of an inquiry into the future impact of serious and organised crime on Australian society. Inevitably, it can give only a generalised and limited window into the workings of the agencies that this committee examines. It took evidence broadly across Australia, and I would hope that its recommendations are taken into account by future governments.

I will focus on four principal recommendations, although I should not dismiss the importance of the balance of the 22 recommendations that are made in the report. The first recommendation that I would draw the House’s attention to is recommendation 15, in which the committee acknowledges and recognises that the Australian Crime Commission has prepared a public version of the Picture of criminality in Australia report. The public version is an unclassified version of the report that is prepared for the commission and for ministers to enable there to be information upon which judgements can be made about the proper resourcing of law enforcement in Australia.

It has always struck the committee that we have a less informed knowledge base in one of the most important areas of social and public policy in Australia—that is, law enforcement—than in almost any other area. In the analogous area of national security, defence, the government and the department regularly publish white papers. Those papers enable baselines to be set and public debate to be focused on issues of large priorities and different strategic settings for our defence structure. For example, you have to identify threats and challenges: you look at whether the Defence Force structure is one which should be highly mobile or whether it should involve heavy armour, whether it should involve submarines or frigates. You look at what tasks it is going to undertake; you look at the threats it faces.

In law enforcement, the debates tend to be much less well focused. It is not to say that there are not public debates at almost every election, particularly at state level. There are sometimes hysteric debates about law and order. But we do not have national benchmarking enabling the community to make intelligent, strategic, long-term judgements about the threats that face the law enforcement environment and about the kinds of policy decisions that ought to be taken strategically to make certain that our law enforcement expenditure is best matched to those challenges. One of the tasks that have been undertaken by the Australian Crime Commission in taking over the role that was rolled into the new structure from the Office of Strategic Crime Assessment, which was a previous stand-alone agency in the department of the Minister for Justice and Customs, is to provide that strategic oversight advice.

It is the view of the Australian Crime Commission that an unclassified version of the classified report should be made available to the public so that there can be an intelligent, focused, strategic discussion in Australia about the very real challenges that law enforcement faces, how state and federal law enforcement can meet those challenges most effectively and where resources need to be applied. It is matter of great regret that, for whatever reason might be behind it, a record of the report has not yet been made available. We re-emphasise a recommendation that we made earlier that a non-classified version should be produced to enable there to be sensible debate. If we go in to the next federal election without that framework, we would be likely to be presented with various arguments about expenditure, priorities and strategic settings in law enforcement, without the baselines being informed by the best possible strategic advice from the agency charged with that responsibility by this parliament and by the nation.

The second recommendation, recommendation 11, fits into the first:

Recommendation 11

7.46 The committee recommends that the Productivity Commission inquire into the cost effectiveness and benchmarking of law enforcement bodies and current national arrangements to address serious and organised crime.

We need the white paper to enable us to make long-term, strategic decisions about resource allocations. We also need to treat our expenditure in law enforcement with the seriousness with which we treat expenditure across all other areas. It is not the case in law enforcement, nor is it in any other area of public policy, that an extra dollar spent in one area will necessarily produce outcomes as effective as those produced by spending in another area. In some areas, if you produce more staff and expend more money you will be rewarded by very effectively enhanced outcomes. Law enforcement capabilities may be massively increased by small increases in expenditure in particularly important areas. In other areas, you will have a law of diminishing returns, where each extra dollar does not provide any substantial increases in output or efficiency.

We need to develop effective measuring devices in law enforcement that enable us to make better judgements about where limited resources should be applied. We have made large increases in the resourcing of law enforcement quite naturally and quite properly as the challenges manifestly facing Australia have become more pressing. But where there are very large expenditures of public resources we need to be able to better distinguish between those areas which need further enhancement and those where we will face the law of diminishing returns.

Those two issues are ones of public policy setting and they are, I think, the most important of the recommendations of the committee. But there are two other areas where deficiencies that were identified by the committee ought to be brought to the attention of the House. Recommendations 21 and 22 address the problems of exchange of information between various jurisdictions. Recommendation 21 is that we provide funding for a feasibility study into the development of a single national case management system and recommendation 22 is that the national Ministerial Council for Police and Emergency Management - Police give consideration and support to the development of a single national case management system.

The evidence shouts out for such a recommendation. For example, in his evidence, Mr Burgess from the Police Federation of Australia offered the following evidence as an example of the consequences of inadequate national case management data not being readily available:

... the shooting of offender William Watkins at Karratha in Western Australia in early 2006 ... Watkins had three days earlier murdered sisters Colleen and Laura Irwin in Melbourne. He had then driven 5½ thousand kilometres in those three days to Western Australia, where he came under the notice of Senior Constable Shane Gray at Karratha for failing to pay for petrol. When Gray did a check on Watkins via the Western Australian police computer system he was not shown as wanted or a suspect on the system. Unfortunately, of course, he was on the Victorian police system, but that was not accessible through the Western Australian system. Watkins attacked Gray and tried to get hold of his firearm. Gray, the senior constable, was seriously injured in the incident, and Watkins was eventually shot and killed.

Plainly this highlights the fact that failure to have coordination between the case management systems is a serious issue. It is crucial that we fix it.

The last matter I raise is that the report draws attention to the fact that Queensland still does not have a capacity for the Queensland Police Service and the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission to intercept telecommunications. It is inevitable that, in an area where there has essentially been a stand-off between the Commonwealth and the state, various people will make political points about the matter. I do not understand why it has not been within the capacity of the Commonwealth to permit the state to utilise the public interest monitor, which they wish to integrate into the use of interception devices, in the Commonwealth scheme.

There has been a very long period where both the Queensland government and the Commonwealth government have said that they want to be able to exercise at a state level the same intercept powers that are exercised in every other state jurisdiction. Queensland, however, say that they want to have the extra civil liberties safeguard of the involvement of a public interest monitor. As a matter of policy from the point of view of the Commonwealth, I see no reason why that could not have been facilitated. Nonetheless, that stand-off is still occurring and whatever political stance one takes—whether one wishes to blame Queensland or the Commonwealth—it is an issue that needs to be resolved. It is a matter that needs attention. I thank the House for its extended tolerance of these remarks. I commend the work of the committee and I acknowledge the work of the chairman, Senator Ian Macdonald, who is tabling this report in the other place. I commend the report for the attention of the next parliament.

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