Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I wish to indicate that the position of the Labor Party on the Australian Crime Commission Amendment (Criminology Research) Bill, as the previous speaker indicated, is that we not oppose it, but we do have, in varying degrees, concerns and reservations about the proposal to amalgamate the Australian Institute of Criminology with the Australian Crime Commission. I acknowledge the work the member for Batman has done to get some commitments from government about retaining an element of independence for the staff of the former Institute of Criminology.

It is not possible to overstate the importance of this independence. My concern is that the stated intent of the government in putting these agencies together is to ensure that the research is more closely aligned with the operational requirements of the state, territory and federal law enforcement agencies. I think that is a concern. Of course you want the research to be incredibly useful for those agencies and it is entirely appropriate that you ensure you are producing useful research, but to say you want research that is more closely aligned with the operational requirements of those agencies is, for me, somewhat troubling. I am concerned that the ability for an independent body to produce and analyse datasets in a way that might challenge some of the fundamental assumptions made by law enforcement agencies, and assumptions made by the governments that are directing those law enforcement agencies, will be profoundly compromised. If you have a law enforcement agency which is very focused, as ours are, on the war on drugs, any independent analysis of data might suggest a harm minimisation approach or indeed an approach similar to those we see emerging in a number of jurisdictions in North America and in South America which is one of decriminalisation. The research and the analysis of data that would go to investigating the potential benefits of such a path might of course not be closely aligned with the operational requirements of a law enforcement agency that is very focused on the business-as-usual model. So I do think that there is a very real risk inherent in what we are proposing to do here with this amalgamation.

It is very important that we have independent data as policymakers in this place. We are trying to grapple with many difficult issues around crime, law enforcement and social cohesion. We absolutely need the ability both in government and in opposition to access reliable and useful data. I want to quote a very pre-eminent person in this area, Dr Don Weatherburn, Director of the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. Dr Weatherburn has this to say:

The abuse of crime statistics is so common it has in some quarters engendered great skepticism about them. The saying there are ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’ is probably nowhere more frequently uttered than in the context of crime statistics. … We have to make judgments about the prevalence of crime, about trends in crime, about the distribution of crime and about the impact of Government efforts to prevent and control crime. We cannot base these judgments on personal experience and anecdote. They have to be based on statistical information.

I discussed this with a former colleague, Paul Papalia of the Western Australia parliament. He is Labor's corrective services spokesperson, and he has been doing an enormous amount of work in restorative justice, focusing on an evidence based approach to crime, punishment and rehabilitation. He speaks about the Crime Research Centre at UWA, which unfortunately has now been closed down in Western Australia. It was established under Joe Berinson, who was one of my predecessors as the member for Perth in this place and who went on to become a very esteemed Attorney-General in Western Australia for a decade. One of the things that he established was the Crime Research Centre at UWA. It was a joint initiative that for over two decades provided the highest quality information.

They had access, because of the collaboration with government and the government's desire for an independent stream of analysis of the data, and that provided a great resource for policymaking. So, when people got on talkback radio and suggested that we needed mandatory sentencing or that this would be the way to go or that would be the way to go, we actually had some mechanism to look at what actually did work. We could actually get beyond the emotion that so often is involved in this notion of crime and punishment, and we could really look at the data and let the data deeply inform the decision-making process.

These are incredibly serious issues for social order and social cohesion. The idea that we should be flying blind or that we should want our pre-eminent national body that is involved in the analysis and preparation of crime statistics to be subject to the operational alignment of enforcement agencies, I think, is deeply concerning. Just as I am very concerned at the way the Barnett government has gradually withdrawn support from the Crime Research Centre in Western Australia leading ultimately to UWA deciding to shut it down, I think that we need to be very careful about what we are doing here. I hope that this is an issue that is properly and fully scrutinised within the Senate committee.

One of the things that I have found most disappointing in moving into the federal arena is how often there is a very clear lack of evidence available to guide policy or to provide a justification for policy. Indeed—and I will get on my little Western Australian hobbyhorse again—today, I raised the issue of why the grants commission is able to say that we are going to change fundamentally the allowance for remoteness. In giving up the GST, we are no longer going to say: the more remote you are the more expensive it becomes to provide services. The remoteness factor will expire once you reach 1,254 kilometres. I prepared a series of questions to the agencies about why 1,254 kilometres would become the magical point. It is the ultimate distance between Sydney and the boundary of New South Wales. But, putting that aside, why would this be chosen as the basis for ending remoteness?

They came back with an answer that centred around, 'Well, it seems intuitively right that at some point the connection between remoteness and cost would not be linear.'

It is 'intuitively' felt. That is the basis on which Western Australia was ripped off another $350 million in our GST take. I can say over and over again that there are areas one comes across where there really are not sound statistics or sound evidence on which policy is based. Much of it is based on intuition, anecdote, gut or perhaps popular sentiment. It is important to take popular sentiment into account. It is also important that we allow popular sentiment to be informed by real rigorous analysis. My experience in many years of public life is that people actually want the right thing for the society and deserve to have good information.

I want to finish by quoting Arie Freiberg, Emeritus Professor of the Faculty of Law at Monash University. He says:

First, as the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the premier statistical body in Australia, states on its website: statistics 'form the basis of our democracy and provide us with the necessary knowledge to assess the health and progress of our society'. They are fundamental to the task of holding governments to account. Statistics must be public, accessible, valid and reliable and governments owe it to their citizens to provide this information to enable them to understand and evaluate government policies.

I think that really sums up just how central this debate is. I once again say that, whilst I can see, perhaps in the short term, cost savings or some close collaborations developing between the Australian Crime Commission and our statistical body, I believe that melding the Institute of Criminology so that it can align itself more closely with the objectives of law enforcement agencies is a profoundly wrong insight. I would hope that the government and, indeed, the Senate thinks about this very deeply.

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