Stephen Parry (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Justice and Customs, Senator Johnston. Crime is a serious concern in the Australian community, and the Australian government has an impressive record of ensuring cooperation between jurisdictions on crime prevention. Noting that statement, will the minister advise the Senate what role the federal government and law enforcement agencies throughout the country have played in establishing a national DNA profile-matching database that is binding for all states?

David Johnston (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Justice and Customs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Parry for that important question and acknowledge his longstanding interest in law enforcement as a former police officer in the state of Tasmania, and I congratulate him on all of the work he did in terms of community policing. What we are saying and dealing with here is that Australian citizens have had enough of people who rob our houses, steal our cars and target defenceless victims. I attend a number of crime forums around Australia from time to time, and the No. 1 issue is: people want to feel safe in their homes. Of course, we all know that the Commonwealth does not have direct responsibility for community policing; that is the job of state police. Notwithstanding that, the Commonwealth seeks to assist and play a role. We try and assist state police in any way we can, particularly on a technical level, in the fight against vandals, burglars, sex offenders and generally thugs who want to disturb and ruin the day-to-day harmonious lives of people in our community.

For all of these reasons, the Howard government has sought to establish—and I want to pause to pay tribute to my friend and colleague Senator Ellison for this fight—a national DNA database for some seven years now. The government is and always has been firmly committed to bringing about effective DNA data matching in the investigation of crime and for other appropriate purposes—for example, victim identification and the identification of missing persons. CrimTrac was established specifically to achieve this goal, at a cost of some $50 million initial funding plus running costs allocated to see it do its job. DNA data matching using a national criminal investigation DNA database is a powerful weapon in the fight against crime. A national DNA database allows data collected by various states and territories to be compared, thus reducing the ability of offenders to avoid justice by simply moving interstate. In other words, the Commonwealth has sought to facilitate a situation where, if somebody commits an offence in the Northern Territory and is subsequently arrested in Tasmania for a similar offence that involves their DNA, we can also prosecute them at a subsequent time for what they did back in the Northern Territory.

To highlight the effectiveness of this database, it was yesterday revealed that in Victoria, in the first two weeks of matching—and they have just started matching, with South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania—they were able to establish close to 1,900 matches of known criminal offences across the nation. That is absolutely outstanding—and more power to the Victorian police and other states’ law enforcement officers now to go and investigate those. But this has come about because the Commonwealth has consistently sought to bring the state police ministers and attorneys-general to the table to match DNA across the nation. Rather than have something like more than 20 bilateral agreements, we sought one agreement facilitated by the Commonwealth. Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory have been exchanging data for four years, and in Queensland recently a rapist who was convicted and sentenced to seven years was also found, through his DNA, to have committed an offence some 10 years previously in Western Australia. Imagine the closure that the victim in that matter in Western Australia, the young woman, had.

I must say, Mr President, I have had to drag the states, as Senator Ellison had to, kicking and screaming to agree to nationalise the DNA data exchange. To their credit—let me give them credit—we have done it at last, and law enforcement is much the better for it. People can now take some comfort in the fact that, if there is an offence committed in Queensland and it cross-references to one in Western Australia, we will catch it.