Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the following matter be referred to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee for inquiry and report by 7 February 2007:

Australia’s national and international policing requirements over the medium- and long-term, with particular reference to:

(a)

personnel and staffing needs of relevant Commonwealth agencies, particularly the Australian Federal Police;

(b)

the adequacy of existing workforce planning arrangements in meeting those needs;

(c)

the effectiveness of existing recruitment practices and training programs;

(d)

the impact of Commonwealth police personnel strategies on state and territory police forces; and

(e)

any other related matter.

There is a very simple reason why I am moving this motion for an inquiry into Australia’s national and international policing requirements over the medium and longer term. Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Senate has not had the opportunity to look at this issue nor has there been a substantive inquiry by the government into this issue.

If you look at the Australian Federal Police, at its birth and its subsequent changes, you will see that it has changed in reaction to events. It was the bombing outside the Hilton Hotel in Sydney back in 1978 that brought about the AFP’s creation. Then the terrorist attacks in New York, almost five years ago to the day, led to significant shifts in its role and an increase in its funding under the current government.

What has been lacking is a strategic assessment of our future policing needs to help guide workforce planning, not just at the federal level but also at the state and territory levels. A failure to have this forward-looking approach means you end up with the quagmire that this government finds itself in today. Look at the response of the Minister for Justice and Customs to a dorothy dixer that he took during yesterday’s question time. Senator Ellison was asked what this government had done to ensure Australia’s security interests. All he talked about were the laws this government had passed and the money it had appropriated. Strong laws and sufficient government funding are both important parts of the equation for a successful policing approach in the modern security environment. But on their own they are not enough. On their own, neither can put themselves to good use. Strong laws cannot enforce themselves and money cannot spend itself on what it was intended for, and sometimes it cannot even be spent at all.

To put the laws to good use two things are required: firstly, sufficient numbers of police officers who are appropriately and properly trained and able to enforce the laws; and, secondly, accountability and transparency mechanisms to help ensure that money is actually put to the use that was intended. Those two elements form the other half of the equation, and both are essential elements that are severely lacking under the current government. For one thing, the government has done away with the accountability mechanisms of the Senate ever since it took control in July last year. Its constant sabotage of the Senate, particularly in the estimates process and the committee structure, have made the task of holding this government to account more arduous. I might add that this does not mean that we never get to the bottom of the stench or that problems disappear, but, rather, that the problems fester away under the surface and it takes longer than necessary to find the solution that the public deserve and that this government should then address.

If you require particular proof that the government wants to hinder accountability when it comes to funding policing then look no further than its refusal to support this inquiry. I am aware of the numbers in this place. This inquiry will not get up, because the government will not support it, but it is an inquiry that should get up and the government should support it. When you look at the government in terms of police numbers and training, you will see that, perhaps more through negligence than intent, it has dropped the ball when it comes to recruiting and training sufficient numbers of police officers. The reason that the government is failing to make a strategic assessment of Australia’s longer term policing needs is that it is not in a position to put in place a plan to ensure that those needs can be met.

In many ways, passing laws and appropriating money, as I said, are the easy parts of the equation to get right, since all the government requires is having the numbers in the Senate. Finding suitable recruits, training them up and giving them plenty of field experience, on the other hand, is not something that can be done overnight. It is a process that takes some time. The government, from time to time, sets itself one-off discretionary targets, such as the recently announced increase to the AFP’s International Deployment Group, but the problem with discretionary targets that are not part of any universal goals is that, when the government comes under pressure to deliver them, they may just come at the cost of other areas of the agency.

So, in two years time, if the government manages to successfully boost the IDG—which is an important initiative that Labor, as I indicated at the time, fully supports—we will need to be sure that experienced officers have not simply been diverted or pulled from other areas of operations within the AFP, such as fighting drugs, crimes abroad, fraud, terrorism and sex-trafficking crimes. All of those exist for the AFP to fight.

The evidence to date causes me serious concern. We can go to some of the evidence that demonstrates that this government has failed in the five years since September 11 to put in place a forward-looking plan. Consider the manner in which the government has increased funding to the AFP over that period, even if we look at one of the things that it has tried to do. In the five budgets since September 11, not one of the significant increases to funding has been built into the forward estimates—not one. In fact, across each of the budgets, the forward estimates for out years projected an average annual decrease of 3.5 per cent and sometimes as high as 22 per cent. The problem facing the Australian Federal Police Commissioner is that, when he looks at his budget and sees a one-off increase of 16 per cent for the first year followed by a decrease for every year after that, he is hardly in the best position to grow the organisation by the actual average increase of 26 per cent. It is just not the right way to grow the Australian Federal Police.

If you look at the effects of not having a plan, you will see that it is of little surprise that the Australian Federal Police average staffing levels fell short of the projected growth in the last financial year by 421 personnel. The 2005-06 Budget Paper No. 1 showed that the Australian Federal Police had expected the average staffing level to rise from 4,865 to 5,191, but the table in the 2006-07 budget paper showed that it ended up falling to 4,717. In other words, the agency was unable to deliver what was projected in the previous year. The 2006-07 budget paper then predicted an increase of only 23 personnel. Not being satisfied with that, we had the opportunity of asking the Australian Federal Police about that at estimates. The AFP responded: ‘Those are the figures in the PBS’—that is, the portfolio budget statement. ‘Are those the figures that we expect? The answer is no.’ So, just three weeks after the budget figures were published, the Australian Federal Police were already contesting their accuracy. It is little wonder that they had difficulty in meeting the previous year’s target.

I had been concerned that the Australian Federal Police had difficulty in actually spending their appropriated money each year, so I put the question to them during the May hearing. The Australian Federal Police took the question on notice—No. 103, for those who are interested in reading the response for themselves. This is what they had to say about the receivables for the 2003-04 year:

A significant upward movement in receivables—

that is, $145 million—

in 2003-04 is due to the forecast surplus of $80m and deferred capital expenditure of $64m.

The main drivers of the surplus were delays in implementing new measures (particularly recruitment activities) and an underspend of $32m for PNG related activities …

I understand and accept the complications related to Papua New Guinea and recognise that the money concerned, a few hundred million dollars, was returned to the government in the last budget, but the Australian Federal Police itself chose to specifically mention, of all other activities, delays in recruitment. Yet the minister told the Australian public on national TV on 27 August that the Australian Federal Police has no trouble in recruiting. It just defies belief.

It is worth mentioning that, in their response to question on notice No. 103, the AFP failed to provide any explanation whatsoever for the additional $275 million in receivables as of the last budget. To be fair, I have asked the Australian Federal Police to provide further clarification on their answer, so I do not want to prejudice their response. But it is far from reassuring to see that it is now September and there has been no answer to date. What it amounts to is a 37 per cent increase in Australian Federal Police funding from the Commonwealth for that year which is as yet unexplained.

I turn to some of the other areas that have become newsworthy issues—for example, airport security and the Wheeler report. The Wheeler report recommended that the Australian Federal Police take control of airport security. The government has managed to put into place airport commanders but, as far as getting the full complement of community police officers together is concerned, it seems that achieving that is a little way off. What we have is airport commanders at airports but no community police officers to go with them.

Meanwhile, an analysis of the numbers in the most recent annual report for 2004-05 reveals that there are 4,770 AFP staff. If you break that down, you will find that 258 were stationed in overseas posts; at least a further 147 were on peacekeeping duties overseas; 1,205 are protective service officers providing guarding and not investigating services; 26 were on secondments to other agencies; a further 1,291 were unsworn; 608 were on ACT local policing duties; and 20 were on local policing duties in other territories. That means that there were fewer than 1,215 sworn operational police officers actively investigating domestic federal crime during that year—that is, less than one sworn officer concentrating on fighting terrorism, illicit drug distribution, money laundering and fraud against the Commonwealth for every 15,000 people.

It is not just the Australian Federal Police that has to deal with the consequences of this government’s failure to properly plan in the area of policing; it impacts upon state and territory police forces as well. To begin with, existing skills shortages across the economy mean that all police forces have a shrinking pool to recruit from. When the federal government bursts onto the scene and announces a massive increase in its own recruitment activities, this can throw a disproportionate burden on state and territory workforce planning.

There is another issue, though—that is, the Australian Federal Police may be forced to poach directly from state and territory police forces in order to achieve its target. The government has given assurances that this will not occur, but the fact that the minister could not say how many of the current applicants before the Australian Federal Police were existing officers in state and territory police forces suggests that he is not particularly worried about the impact it might have on any agency other than his own.

Now the government is about to defend its position of not having a Senate inquiry into this matter. The last inquiry was before September 11; it was a rather narrow inquiry, dealing with certain matters. There have been none from the government, unless you go right back to 1998—that was the last one. An inquiry like this will not get off the ground because this government will not support it. In the first week of the new committee structure, it is surprising that the government is going to knock over a reasonable reference to the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs to look at this issue. I think it is because this is an inquiry that this government does not want as it thinks that scrutiny is not good. You could say that it is because it might think that there are no serious concerns about the current state of affairs. The government might want to pretend that everything is rosy, but even the minister failed to deny Labor’s claim that average staffing levels fell 421 short of the target for the last financial year. He was given the opportunity yesterday to do that and he failed to take that up.

The reason is that the government are addicted to shutting down all avenues for holding themselves to account. They tried to argue that changing the committee system would mean that more inquiries would get up because the government would not have to worry about them being run by a hostile chair. That was one of the arguments that was put. I am not going to get direct about this, but they put up a number and range of spurious reasons as to why the new committee structure would provide a more streamlined and efficient system which would allow committees to deal with references. That has not come to pass, I have to say. On the second day into the new committee structure, here we are: the government are again seeking to reject this reference, despite the compelling need for it and despite the government’s claim to care about national security.

The Prime Minister likes to ask voters to judge him on his record. I have looked at the PM’s record on national policing and I have to say that I am far from reassured. If this government were proud and confident of its record on national policing then it would have nothing to be concerned about and nothing to fear from having an inquiry proceed, particularly given that it would be responsible for chairing it as well.