Darren Cheeseman (Corangamite, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Home Affairs. Will the minister update the House on binge drinking and what it means for our front-line police?

Bob Debus (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Corangamite for his entirely relevant question. Binge drinking, the excessive consumption of alcohol, is a national problem that confronts police in every jurisdiction across Australia every day. A report prepared by the National Drug Law Enforcement Research Fund, published last year, conservatively estimated the cost of alcohol related crime in Australia to be over $1.7 billion a year based on recent analysis. The policing costs alone are estimated at $747 million a year. Imagine what we could do if we had an extra $747 million a year to spend on front-line policing. There would be another 7,000 constables.

The men and women of our police forces routinely face situations as a consequence of alcohol abuse that all of us here would find utterly confronting. They are often the first on the scene attending horrific road accidents. Then they have the onerous responsibility of telling the parents that their child, a young P-plate driver, was killed because of an alcohol related incident. They have the responsibility for presenting these tragic cases to the coroner and prosecuting another P-plater for causing the death of their best friend. The report that I have mentioned also found that the total cost of alcohol related road crashes was over $3 billion a year, including human costs of nearly $2 billion and general costs, including police attendance, of nearly half a billion dollars—again, money that could be far better spent.

We in the Commonwealth have a responsibility to do what we can to demonstrate leadership, and that means right here in the parliament. Over the break we are going to be spending more time working in our electorates. I cannot imagine how members opposite will explain to their local police—the men and women on the front line facing these issues on a daily basis—why they do not support them. While it is the states and territories that deal with the day-to-day law enforcement difficulties that come from binge drinking, the Commonwealth must act where it has the power to do so. The government finds it astonishing that the opposition are refusing to support Australia’s working police men and women and prefer to hand truckloads of money back to the liquor industry. Police have been publicly pleading for more action on binge drinking. We should not ignore our police. It is they who are on the front line, not the Liberal Party.