Youth Crime Roundtable

Mr BATTY (Bragg) (15:05): My question is to the Minister for Police. Will the minister be sitting on the expert round table on youth crime and, if so, can he advise who else will be sitting on the round table and on what date it will first meet?

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee—Treasurer, Minister for Defence and Space Industries, Minister for Police) (15:05): As the Attorney-General announced this morning, this is a round table that he is convening of not only the criminal justice agencies that report to him, but he has been speaking, of course, not just with me and with other cabinet ministers and the police commissioner, as I indicated earlier, but now he is seeking to expand those consultations.

If the member for Bragg is after a full list of people who will be attending that, I am happy to take that away and liaise with my colleague in the other place, the Attorney-General. He has made it clear, as indeed has the presence of the police commissioner in making the announcement today for the television media, that he has been consulting with South Australia Police and that has led to the announcement that was made today.

It's another example of this government making sure that we do the consultation properly in advance of settling a bill to come into this place. That's the approach that we have taken on more than 30 occasions in toughening legislation to better protect the community. It's the approach we have taken on knife crime: to come up with a comprehensive package of reforms to make sure that we had a much better regime controlling the sale of knives.

Those opposite, some of whom would be aware of the detail of this reform, would know that it enables the police, for example, to have metal detector searches at a much broader range of activities and events throughout the community. It expands the definition of a school in the offence so that somebody possessing a knife at school includes universities, childcare centres, preschools and other educational facilities. It requires the safe storage of knives. It is a comprehensive reform, as well as prohibiting the sale of knives to 16 and 17 year olds.

If you contrast that approach, a comprehensive set of law reforms to knives as they are supplied here in South Australia, to what those opposite came up with, which was a one-line response about the sale of knives to 16 and 17 year olds, you can see the value of the two different approaches. You do the work up-front and you do the consultation up-front and you get a better result. If you rush out without giving it thought, if you don't think these things through properly, then you don't actually get a proper response to the issue.

On that one, that ill-thought through approach on something like knife crime, that's the sort of thing that would lead you to making a contribution to a debate where you are talking about your visit to an RSPCA shelter rather than talking about knife crime. It's one thing to go to an RSPCA shelter somewhere near a hotel that may or may not have had a knife incident once before, but that's, I guess, a reflection of not having enough to contribute to the debate, where you are filling it up with tales of family cat purchases rather than knife crime reforms. So that's where it comes. We have the shadow attorney-general walking us through the travails of his family in acquiring new cats into their household rather than talking about knife crime during a parliamentary debate about knife law reform. That's the approach of the opposition: talking about kittens rather than knives.