Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Minister for Justice) Share this | Hansard source

This commitment is part of our $50 million Safer Streets policy. This policy is designed to support communities to address crime and antisocial behaviour by funding measures such as CCTV and lighting. This funding will target crime hot spots in local communities, based on the advice that we get from those local communities in conjunction with local policing services.

Of the $50 million funding for this program, $41 million is coming from the National Crime Prevention Fund and $9 million from proceeds-of-crime money. We made this policy announcement in October 2012 and made very clear where the money would come from. That money had at the time been frozen within the budget. Traditionally, proceeds-of-crime money has funded crime-prevention projects, but the Labor Party in its desperate search for savings said that it was not going to honour what previous governments had done and make sure that proceeds of crime were actually invested in crime-fighting projects. We did not think that that was a smart thing to do. We said that we would take that money and invest it around Australia in projects that the community thinks are important to tackle crime in their local area.

Subsequently, the Labor Party had a change of heart. They said that they were now going to take that money and invest it in crime-fighting projects through the national crime prevention program. After freezing that money, they made announcements between 7 August and 19 August this year. We had already allocated that funding to our Safer Streets project. The Labor Party made those commitments in the full knowledge that if they lost the election the commitments could not possibly be honoured, because we had allocated that money to the Safer Streets program. They misled—wilfully misled—very good community organisations—

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