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

I thank the member for Forde for his question. I was very pleased to join him over the course of the last few weeks at Logan City Council for some announcements about the expansion of the CCTV network in his electorate of Forde. Logan has a very extensive CCTV network. In fact, it would be one of the most comprehensive networks anywhere in the country. Previous governments, including the Howard government, contributed extensively to that. The Abbott government is very pleased to join the member for Forde in announcing an expansion of that CCTV network. I note that the Mayor of Logan and councillors, from the interaction we had when I visited with the member for Forde, were very grateful for the assistance of the Abbott government under our Safer Streets program.

In the budget we have delivered on our election commitment, ensuring that all proceeds of crime money is used to fight crime. When the former government was in office, they froze that proceeds of crime money. It had always been expended to the benefit of law enforcement agencies to stop future criminal activity. They froze the confiscated assets account and they used that money to prop up the budget for political reasons. Had this continued, had we not reversed that when we arrived in office, up to $112 million seized from criminals, which we would have collected from their criminal activities, would have been locked in that account by the 2017-18 financial year. We reversed that decision so that proceeds of crime will again be available to fund local crime prevention strategies such as the Safer Streets strategy, which funds the Logan City Council CCTV network in Forde. We are using these funds straight away to address the legacy of underinvestment in crime prevention by the previous government. The previous government has a dreadful record on this—they froze proceeds of crime and they significantly attacked all of our law enforcement agencies. The Australian Crime Commission, in particular, was savaged by the previous government over six years. A third of its personnel and a third of its budget was cut.

We need to now move on and reinvigorate law enforcement agencies and make sure that proceeds of crime are being used to attack criminal activity—as they always were in the past, until the previous government got so desperate to pretend it had a surplus and subsequently froze that proceeds of crime money. Future decisions on proceeds of crime will be made at my discretion. This is an important step in reducing administrative red tape so that funding can easily flow back for what is needed in our communities. We will be looking at making sure our law enforcement agencies are also getting a fair share of that funding to do their very important work, after six years of underinvestment and budget cuts from previous governments. It has always been the Abbott government's intention that proceeds of crime be returned to the community so that the crimes of yesterday will be used to prevent the crimes of tomorrow. Projects will be funded to support crime prevention and law enforcement initiatives, including Safer Streets, as the member for Forde alluded to.

How fortuitous, the member for Swan and the member for Lindsay are also getting funding under the Safer Streets program, as well as the member for Higgins. I have been to all of your electorates and I am looking forward to coming to the member for Higgins' electorate to make an announcement about the Safer Streets funding that we will be deploying Higgins. This money has also been used to fund such things as the establishment of the National Anti-Gangs Squad team in Western Australia. We will be using over $10 million of the proceeds of crime funding so that a number of AFP officers and other federal law enforcement officers, including an officer from the Australian tax office, will be embedded in the Western Australia Police force, within their Anti-Gangs Squad, to work constructively to make sure that they are doing all they can in the national fight against organised crime and, in particular, of course, outlaw motorcycle gangs that have been the focus of the Western Australia Police attention until this point.

I thank the member for Forde for that question. I appreciate his ongoing interest in community safety within his electorate.

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