Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to update the House on the parlous state of police services offered to the suburb of Moorooka. The Moorooka police station in Hamilton Road has served our local community well, although for many people newer to the area it is not immediately identifiable. The case that I have put to the people of the suburb of Moorooka is the need for a 24-hour police station—and, moreover, a shopfront in the Moorvale shops to provide an obvious community presence.

But it gets worse than that. I have had individual police officers who have said that the cause I am championing is something that needs to be championed. Let me tell the House a little bit about what is actually happening, based on what individual police officers have told me at the Moorooka police station. This station does not have an interview facility. All interviews must be videotaped on three machines. But they do not even have an interview room, so how can they do that? If they want to interview a suspect, they have to take them to the Sherwood police station, to Acacia Ridge or to Inala—a major problem on the nightshift, if there happens to be one operating. Police are worried that a similar thing could happen as happened to their colleague Chris Hurley on Palm Island.

This is not a 24-hour police station in any sense of the words. It only provides 24-hour patrols every second week! On the off weeks it is covered by other stations from as far away as Mount Ommaney. There is no holding cell at Moorooka. Violent offenders are told to sit on a chair in the middle of the room—and, presumably, to be quiet. The building is at capacity. While there is currently the complement of allocated staff of 19, officers are telling me that it is still badly understaffed. However, despite all the community need, and all the occupational health and safety issues associated with this overcrowding, basically if more officers were allocated to Moorooka there simply would not be enough room. A new computer system has been installed, but it has added half an hour of time to the processing of even one piece of paperwork—and it is longer for more complicated cases.

There is also a special issue around Moorooka. There is a variety of African faces, which presents its own challenge. Most of these folk are refugees, humble and keen to get on with their new lives here. But some are making mistakes in their early days in Australia. They are sitting around in public places, on railway stations throughout the course of the day and into the night; in bus stops and outside Woolworths at Beaudesert Road in Moorooka. People are actually frightened and confronted by large groups of these kids, in the main, who are hanging around. The police do their bit and they try to move them on. They say: ‘Come on, let’s play fair; we don’t put our feet up on the bus stops. We do things in a different way in Australia.’ But a few of the tough ones are taking the police on. As I say, these are law-abiding, decent people; but at the same time there are some young men who have been around soldiers in their country of birth since they were young. Some have seen people killed and feel the authorities here are really quite cowardly and too restrained by law to do anything to them. They have absolutely no respect, in some cases, for anybody in uniform. There is a need, therefore, for the Queensland Police Service  to have more African faces in their ranks.

The Queensland Police Service, I must say, to be fair, has the best attendance to these community relations issues of any police service in Australia. As a former minister for multicultural affairs in this government, I know that Queensland does a good job in this regard. But there are just too few. There is only one African face at work, and there are tens of thousands of African faces in the community. We need someone to help break down those barriers and get rid of this too-thin-on-the-ground approach.

That is another reason why we need the Moorvale shopfront, why we need to see the Queensland Police Service invest in a physical presence that accommodates the numbers of police officers needed to provide 24-hour protection and points of certainty, to provide for occupational health and safety requirements for the individual officers and to reduce the stress levels that police officers face in going about their everyday duties. It is also important that the police presence is very obvious, to deal with the community relations issues.

The current station is old; it probably only has a usable life of a few years, despite some renovations. It is simply not big enough. The fact is that there is only a 24-hour police presence every second week. There is only a 24-hour police presence in that off-week by use of a blue phone. That means you pick up the phone and you talk to someone miles away. The bottom line, as the Queensland police union says, is that essentially there is only one patrol on the south side of Brisbane at night most nights of the week. The police cannot afford to have the off days that apparently the criminals are supposed to have in our community. The idea that crime should only be committed every second week, that crime should only be committed between eight and three on Monday to Friday, is a joke—an absolute farce. As the local member I am determined to represent this cause. (Time expired)