Louise Markus (Greenway, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to give my full support to the New South Wales Police Service and their efforts to increase base police numbers. The New South Wales Police Service can only be as good as the resources provided to them. These resources include manpower, equipment, administration material and stationery, to name a few. Who would ever have thought that, while $88 million was spent on the broken millennium trains, a police officer has to buy their own clipboard so that they can have something to lean on in the car to do their paperwork because the stationery budget is nearly exhausted? This is unacceptable.

On the home front, we expect our police to be front-line officers walking the beat and responding to calls. This is not happening, as much as our police would like it to. It is not because the officers do not want to go out; it is because the resources of staff on duty are so stretched that the manpower is not there in the first place. New South Wales is one of the largest police districts in the world and we should have the resources to man it. New South Wales has approximately 14,500 officers protecting over 6½ million people all within an area of some 800,000 square kilometres. We have the worst overall crime rate in the country. Of the 13 types of crime defined, New South Wales rates the worst in 11 of them. It seems no coincidence that we have the highest overall crime rate and the second lowest number of police per thousand people. We hear New South Wales Labor talking about zero tolerance like New York, but how can New South Wales reach that benchmark when New York has five police officers for every 1,000 people and New South Wales has 2.18 police officers for every 1000 people?

The local area commanders are doing all they can with what limited resources they have and their officers know this. The Labor Premier recently came out boasting about the latest numbers of police graduates to boost our police service, but what he failed to mention is that they are really just filling the gaps of police who are still listed as ‘actual strength’. What is actual strength? Actual strength is the number of officers a station has on its books. Let us say a police station has an actual strength of 182 authorised staff. To the average person, 182 authorised staff at a station sounds impressive. But what the public are not told is that 23 per cent are on sick report, long-term sick report, temporary restricted duties, permanent restricted duties, maternity leave or leave without pay. So the extra eight police who recently graduated and joined this station may now be recorded as part of a 190 authorised staff but what they are really doing is filling in the gaps for some of the 23 per cent who are not actually on duty for various reasons. On top of this, we have officers on annual leave, training, with court duties and attending to other stations or duties. Those people who I mentioned above may remain on the roster but they do not fill the front-line shifts.

How are new police officers supposed to get any real mentoring and support? New police officers come in and there are not the resources to mentor them. I have been advised that only 13.5 per cent of the New South Wales Police Service have more than 20 years experience and only 12.5 per cent of our leaders are over 45 years of age. The state Labor government should be ashamed of themselves. We have newly graduated committed police officers who just want to learn and be the best they can. How can they learn when in 2005, for example, approximately 700 officers either resigned or were medically retired?

We have good New South Wales police officers who want to get out into the field and do their job to the best of their ability, but they are not resourced. We have detectives who cannot do their job because at times they are filling the gaps of the front-line officers who still appear as actual staff but are not there to fill the shift. We have officers who have to work in unacceptable conditions, such as eight people sharing desks which only cater for four or working in a station where the number of base staff is twice the size that it was originally intended that the building should hold—or worse: police sitting on chairs that have masking tape in place because they are so old and tattered. Our police and our community deserve better.

One of the comments that I get back from people in my community is that they want to feel safe in their community. They call the police and the police want to be able to come but they cannot. If I as the federal member am aware of the crime concerns then surely the state members must be aware of them as well. It is absolute negligence that the New South Wales Labor government has not done more than top up the force. What we are talking about is people’s welfare; people’s lives; people’s safety; our community’s safety. A police presence reduces crime. Statistics from around the world prove that. I urge the people of New South Wales who are sick of being treated like second-class citizens with this unacceptable standard to vote with their feet for a change of government. In the meantime, if the New South Wales Labor government is really serious about the needs of this state, I challenge them to put some of the money they will save on the Murray-Darling into resourcing the police force. This is an issue that is significant for every single individual in the community. (Time expired)