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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-05-03 Daily Xml
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POLICE LOCAL SERVICE AREAS

Mr GARDNER (Morialta) (11:48): I move:

That this house calls upon the police minister to request that the SAPOL local service area for the suburbs of Woodforde and Teringie be adjusted from the Hills Fleurieu Local Service Area to either the Eastern Adelaide or Holden Hill local service areas.

I introduce this motion today because my requests to the police minister to ensure that common sense prevail in this matter have been declined at this stage. I want to make clear from the outset that, for the most part, we are satisfied, impressed and grateful for the police responses to emergency situations, including in these areas.

Response times to incidents classified as high priority emergencies are generally impressive, both in theory and in lived experience. In situations that receive this classification the police despatch the nearest car, irrespective of which local service area the car is from. This motion exists because occasionally it is possible for serious and potentially life-threatening situations to fail to reach that initial classification that would bring the nearest car and therefore the notification reverts to the local service area (or LSA, as I will refer to it as through this speech).

The suburbs of Woodforde and Teringie lie less than nine kilometres east of where we stand right now. For the most part, they are located in the foothills on suburban-size blocks with people living in typical suburban-size houses. As a reference point, the suburb of Woodforde is also notable for containing Rostrevor College and the Magill Training Centre. Strangely, these suburbs of Woodforde and Teringie are located in the Hills Fleurieu Local Service Area as far as SAPOL is concerned.

Although the significant police stations at Holden Hill and Norwood—which is of course part of Adelaide East—are literally just a handful of minutes north or west of these suburbs, residents in Woodforde and Teringie are instead serviced by the Mount Barker Police Station 38 kilometres away. This has caused serious issues for some of my constituents, a couple of which I will outline shortly.

I would first like to indicate to the house that today I will be lodging with the Clerk two petitions relating to this matter, which I have here and will bring over in a moment—one for each suburb. Apart from the suburb name, they are identical, and they read:

We draw the attention of your Honourable House to the situation of police cover in the suburb of Teringie [or, indeed, Woodforde]. The suburb is currently zoned within the Hills Fleurieu Local Service Area for [South Australia] Police, which is serviced by Mount Barker Police Station located 38 kilometres from the suburb. Because of this, police patrols are required to travel extensive distances to service Teringie [or, indeed, Woodforde] when both Holden Hill Police Station and Norwood Police Station are located within 8 kilometres of the suburb.

Actually, on double-checking after this petition was printed, they are closer to 6.5 kilometres from these suburbs. The petitions continue:

Your petitioners therefore request the House to request that the Police Minister change SAPOL's Local Service Areas so that Teringie [or Woodforde] falls within the Eastern Adelaide Local Service Area or the Holden Hill [LSA].

The settled parts of Teringie go further into the Hills than Woodforde: it extends much of the way up to Norton Summit; however, even despite this, at its closest point at the corner of Teringie Drive and Norton Summit Road, it is still 30 kilometres from Teringie Drive to the Mount Barker Police Station.

Police cars driving from Mount Barker to this closest point will spend most of their transit time driving to the area serviced by Norwood police, and then they will drive through the area serviced by Norwood before eventually getting back into their own LSA at Teringie. With any luck, they will be on the road for less than 40 minutes from the time of dispatch to the time of arrival to this suburb in metropolitan Adelaide.

The petitions I refer to have been signed by more than a quarter of the residents from the two suburbs. We held two street corner meetings, which shadow police minister Duncan McFetridge was good enough to attend, but it is not as though we were going door to door collecting signatures on this occasion. Within two months, more than a quarter of these populations signed and sent in petitions.

At the Woodforde street corner meeting in particular, I note that more than 30 residents came out on a Saturday morning, even though it was 39° in the shade on the day in question. Common sense suggests that these suburbs should be moved to a metropolitan LSA, and it is the clear wish of the community as well. Even so, it is important to note for the record that this is not just an esoteric or theoretical matter; there have been tangible problems caused by the current arrangements.

Earlier I identified that we are generally impressed by and grateful for the speedy response times of police. In the two years I have been here, I have rarely been approached by constituents complaining about response times. I am more usually told stories by people who appreciated the quick response times. There are, however, three categories of exceptions. First, there have been a number of complaints about long-boarding at Montacute, which both I and the previous member for Morialta have raised previously, and which I will raise again in the future.

The other two areas of complaints have come from residents of Woodforde and Teringie about just these issues. For the benefit of the house, Woodforde, Teringie and Montacute are not large communities of people; between them, they comprise less than 2 per cent of the population of Morialta, yet they comprise 100 per cent of the complaints about this problem that is being identified. I do not think that it is a giant leap of imagination to understand that when 2 per cent of the community—such a small population base—are making all the complaints about an area, then perhaps this is an area of public policy that needs to be looked at, and common sense should ideally be applied to fixing it.

Some of these complaints have been in relation to traffic matters; some have been in relation to serious matters involving risks to personal safety. In one recent incident that prompted a set of correspondence with the police minister, a couple in Woodforde were confronted in the early hours of the morning on 30 October 2011 by a man attempting to break into their house. He was at first banging on their front door and, after being told to leave, he circled he house, banging on windows and seeking alternative entry points.

My constituents called 000 and sought the help of police. They were informed that the police were on their way and would be there soon. According to police records, a car was dispatched within five minutes, but, unfortunately, from Mount Barker. According to police records, after waiting 15 minutes for that police car my constituents again called 000 and were informed that a car was on its way. They stayed on the phone to the operator until police arrived, which was unfortunately several minutes after the threatening intruder had left their property.

On this occasion—again according to those police records—it took the police car 32 minutes to drive from Mount Barker to Woodforde. From the time of the call it was nearly 40 minutes during which time two elderly constituents of mine sat in their house in terror waiting for police to show up, with a stranger banging on their doors and windows.

My constituents are most grateful to the police officers who attended at their house and the officers were apologetic about the time it had taken to arrive. It was not their fault, of course; they had to come all the way from Mount Barker—how ridiculous. How ridiculous that a patrol car had to drive from Mount Barker for this incident and how ridiculous that it had to almost drive past the Norwood police station about three-quarters of the way along its journey to get to Woodforde.

I wrote to the Minister for Police on 2 December 2011 asking that she request the Commissioner of Police to consider moving Woodforde and Teringie into the Norwood local service area. On 17 January 2012 I received a response from the acting police minister, the Hon. Patrick Conlon, stating:

...the capacity for SAPOL to use patrols from an adjoining area means that changing the LSA boundaries will not necessarily change response times.

I accept that on occasions where things are classified as urgent and of critical high priority that is probably true. While the acting minister did acknowledge that the state duty officer has the discretion to use other resources to respond to incidents, I have a concern that there will be further cases in Teringie-Woodforde in the future where incidents which require a prompt response (as these did) fall through the cracks and are not appropriately assessed as urgent, leaving residents in serious peril while awaiting a patrol car from Mount Barker or Gumeracha instead of receiving urgent assistance from a nearby patrol car.

Many of the residents who came along to the street corner meetings I held with the shadow police minister had their own stories to share. Some were very positive and most people present were aware of at least one good news story—some, two or three—but they also had concerns about where there have been gaps in service. These ranged from the inconvenience of being asked to travel to the Mount Barker Police Station to attend to paperwork requested by police for various reasons to concerns about the sorts of traffic matters that I related before, and others were more serious.

One story in particular stuck in my mind. Rather than try to paraphrase an awful situation I will quote verbatim the email that the resident in question sent me outlining the incident which occurred before my time in parliament and therefore before the present minister's time as police minister. I will not identify the constituent or the names of her sons; I will refer to them as X and Y. The email reads:

An intruder barged into the house, wielding a machete...threatening my sons. The youngest, (x) escaped out a back door, and fled to the neighbours across the road. (The other) barricaded himself and his girlfriend downstairs in what was an absolutely horrific situation. Having called for police assistance 3 or 4 times...the girlfriend was freaking out, as (my son) was shouldering the door closed to prevent this intruder from getting downstairs to them...meanwhile, (he) was sick with worry if his little brother (x) was alive or dead upstairs. (He) could hear the destruction upstairs, this guy was slashing and smashing everything in sight.

Long story short...my son (x) and his girlfriend called 000 so many times...the girlfriend called her brother, who lived at Walkley Heights...and he arrived before the police! (x) went to the neighbours across the road, and they called the police. The neighbours called and called 000! My youngest son (x), 13, watched with the neighbours across the road as this maniac fled the scene, after having trashed the house and terrorized my son and his girlfriend.

I can only imagine the terror that this family went through. They have told me that this night still haunts them and that while they know the police did all they could 'it would have made a huge difference' if they had been able to get there more quickly; if, perhaps, they had had less distance to travel.

I have made it clear on a number of occasions in this debate that I have nothing but the utmost respect for South Australia's police officers, including those based at Mount Barker, Gumeracha and other areas in the Hills Fleurieu LSA. I have a number of close friends among their ranks. The officers who regularly attend to duties within the Morialta electorate who I have had cause to encounter in the course of my professional duties have been everything that one might hope they would be. This motion is in no way an attack on any of them, it is simply a call for common sense to be applied to ensure that my constituents are no longer in any danger of falling through the gaps if they find themselves in a crisis situation.

Clearly it is unrealistic to expect that police officers based at Mount Barker can service Woodforde and Teringie as efficiently from 38 kilometres away as could either of the two stations (Holden Hill or Norwood) which are less than seven—close to six—kilometres away, especially considering the growth expected in Mount Barker in the future. Think about the waste involved of requiring massive trips from Mount Barker to Woodforde and Teringie (an over one-hour round trip) and then finding out that their next job is back in Mount Barker or even on the other side of their LSA.

This motion offers a sensible solution: to shift the very edge of their boundaries into the neighbouring LSA. It makes sense for the community and the police serving that community to have suburbs within LSAs which are serviced by convenient police stations taking into account the circumstances of the area.

I bring this matter to the parliament on behalf of my community and at their request. This could have been sorted out six months ago by the minister quickly, quietly and neatly, putting this issue to SAPOL, but instead here we are. No sensible explanation has been put forward as to why the boundaries fall where they do, other than it happens to be where the council boundaries lie. This is arbitrary. It is a logical non sequitur; one does not follow the other. Ambulances do not follow these boundaries. Rostrevor College is in Woodforde. When they were doing their partnerships for trade training centres with other schools, they did not go to Stirling, they went to Grand Junction Road. I urge the government again to consider the arguments put forward, consider the concerns raised, the wishes of the broader community and give common sense a run in the park.

I am perfectly happy for the government to consider these matters afresh, if they wish, and deal with it outside of the house, if that is what it will take to get the job done. I can assure the minister that this is a very serious concern. This is not something I wish to play politics with; that is why I tried to achieve it through a letter. In fact, as a sweetener, I will even go one step further if it will achieve a positive result. If the minister can deliver on this for the community, I will even make sure she gets all the credit and they know that it is all thanks to her good work. I will put her name and her photo in my newsletter. I will let everyone know that she saw reason, she used common sense and she sorted it out on behalf of the government—a government that has decided to consult and then decide. Minister, your petitioners ask that you do, and I urge the house to follow suit.

The Hon. J.M. RANKINE (Wright—Minister for Police, Minister for Correctional Services, Minister for Emergency Services, Minister for Road Safety, Minister for Multicultural Affairs) (12:01): The member for Morialta seeks to move boundaries so that Woodforde and Teringie fall within the Eastern Adelaide or Holden Hill local service area rather than the Hills Fleurieu LSA. I have written to the member about this matter and advised that SAPOL, along with many other government agencies, aligned their service delivery boundaries between 2007 and 2009.

This process was about improving services, reporting and accountability. It has led to a much higher level of cooperation and coordination between agencies such as SAPOL, Housing SA, DCS and SA Health through such programs as the family violence framework, offender management plans and neighbourhood policing teams. I am advised that earlier recruitment drives resulted in four additional police positions being allocated to the Hills Fleurieu Local Service Area and, since the introduction of uniform regional boundaries in 2009, a further nine positions have been added. Three hundred and thirteen additional officers are being recruited to the end of 2015-16 and SAPOL advises this will see further increases in permanent staffing levels for the Hills Fleurieu LSA.

In the short term, an additional family violence officer is expected to join the Hills Fleurieu LSA to support the recent implementation of the Intervention Orders (Prevention of Abuse) Act 2009. I have also previously advised the member for Morialta that when a person calls 131 444 or 000, the state duty manager and the state shift controller have the authority to ask a patrol from an adjoining area to respond to a request for assistance. Boundaries of an LSA are not the Berlin Wall nor the Great Wall of China. A police vehicle may cross that boundary as easily as Mr Gardner himself.

I note that LSA boundaries do not prevent people from attending a police station of their choice for other business nor do they prevent people from calling a police station directly rather than calling 131 444. That being said, I encourage members of the public to use the specialist centralised 24 hour a day service provided by Police Communications Centre so that police can prioritise their resources to protect life and property wherever the threat may be.

In discussions with the shadow minister for police on 23 April 2012, I am told that senior police reminded the Liberals that if you move boundaries then you often need to move resources as well to ensure proper support for residents and businesses. The latest SAPOL annual report shows the Hills Fleurieu LSA with a population of 117,000 compared with 150,000 for the Eastern Adelaide LSA and 223,000 for the Holden Hill LSA. The member for Morialta may wish to consult his colleagues with electorates in the Hills Fleurieu area about the possibility of moving resources to adjoining LSAs. I will be noting those supporting this motion so that I can remind their constituents that their local member supported moving police away from their electorate.

Police also reminded the shadow minister that suburban LSAs face challenges to ensure that patrols are in the right place at the right time. A freight train, for example, moving through Goodwood or the northern suburbs may block a road for 10 minutes and prevent the closest patrol from attending an urgent request for help. In these situations another patrol may assist, and it is no different in the foothills.

The member for Morialta also seems to believe that police sit around the station waiting for the phone to ring. I can assure the house that patrols are constantly mobile to act as a deterrent and detect crime. When a call comes in they are often already on the road and not being dispatched from a particular station. The member for Morialta's motion also fails to recognise that SAPOL provides a number of statewide, specialist support services, such as Star Group, Mounted Operations, the Marine Unit, the Traffic Enforcement Branch, the Dog Squad, the Drug Squad, Major Crime, Sex Crimes, Commercial and Electronic Crime, Organised Crime and the State Intelligence Branch, just to name a few.

LSA functions are one of the many factors that contribute to the services delivered by SAPOL. All these services are underpinned by the support of the state Labor government that has almost doubled the police budget to $722 million in the past decade and provided a record investment of $180 million in new police stations, headquarters and our first ever purpose-built academy. The results speak for themselves.

Under the former Liberal government, victim-reported crime increased by 50,000 offences per year—50,000 it increased per year. Since Labor was elected, victim-reported crime is down by 75,000 offences per year. I also note that governments of all persuasions rely on the police commissioner for professional advice, and the commissioner has not raised any concerns with me about LSA boundaries stopping police from protecting our community.

The commissioner also issues general orders and allocates police resources in accordance with the SAPOL resource allocation model. I am assured that this model takes into account a range of information and provides for necessary staffing and resources to meet the needs of our communities around the state. SAPOL stands for the South Australia Police. In 1838 SAPOL became—

Mr Marshall interjecting:

The ACTING SPEAKER (Hon. M. J. Wright): Order!

The Hon. J.M. RANKINE: —the first centrally administered police service in the world. We deliberately chose not to have a separate police service for every town or every council because our resources and commitment apply equally to all people in all areas.

Mr GARDNER (Morialta) (12:08): I am disappointed that the minister decided to take what was half a bureaucratic approach and half a political approach to this rather than just looking at the issue at stake and the issues brought forward in good faith by my constituents, as I brought them forward to her six months ago.

The Hon. J.M. Rankine interjecting:

Mr GARDNER: The minister interjects that she was telling us the facts. Well, let us go through a couple of things. First, she said repeatedly that she had previously advised me. I can assure the house that she has not previously advised me of anything. It took several months to get a response from the minister, and when I did it was from the acting police minister. Her office may have had some involvement with the drafting of the letter, perhaps, as is normal.

I did not want to make a big deal out of this, but it took a hell of a long time to get any sort of response, and when I did get a response it was from the acting minister diligently going through his brief as it was then. For her to suggest that she has had some personal, long involvement in this case is patently a nonsense.

The minister talked about how the LSA boundaries were aligned with local government and ambulance and others as part of a process to improve services, cooperation and accountability. Process is certainly part of the truth, but it has not actually improved services to my residents in Woodforde and Teringie. A human cost has been identified in the cases that I have brought to the attention of the house, and that human cost is serious and deserves to be taken seriously.

The reason we have local members of parliament, amongst others, is so that our constituents' concerns can be brought to the attention of the bureaucracy and ministers who might not otherwise have the opportunity to consider those local concerns, the bits where the process has not accounted for every eventuality, for the occasions where the process is not the answer and where you have to take into account what happens on the ground.

The minister said that I believe local service areas are stronger boundaries than they are. She said, 'They are not the Berlin Wall nor the Great Wall of China,' and nobody is suggesting that they are. If she had been listening, she would have heard me say that on most occasions the appropriate urgency is given to a situation and response times are excellent. However, I identified two lengthy examples—and a number of others have been provided to me—where appropriate response did not occur, where they had not been given the appropriate level of urgency and the nearest possible car had not been assigned.

In the documents provided by the department, a situation was identified where a car came from Mount Barker in October. The minister seemed to suggest that I was making it up, that people were waiting around in Mount Barker for the call. It is not me saying this. The documents provided by SAPOL state that the car was dispatched within five minutes of the telephone call and arrived at the house 32 minutes later. So nearly 40 minutes to arrive at an urgent situation, where my elderly constituents had an intruder banging on their front door, banging on their windows, trying to get into their house. They were terrified. There are other situations where families are still in shock.

I am very disappointed that the minister's reaction—I was going to say knee-jerk reaction, but it has been six months—has been to so categorically ignore the importance of this issue to this small community. I think it is important that the government has a think about it. I would like to think that someone in the minister's office is listening and can have a chat to someone at SAPOL and say, 'How difficult would it be to shift the boundary by this much?'

The minister talked about resources and the potential that resources would have to be reallocated from the Hills Fleurieu area (with its 150,000 residents, I think she said) to the Eastern Adelaide or Holden Hill local service areas, with its 220,000 residents. We are talking about fewer than 1,000 people. This is less than a half a per cent addition to what Holden Hill would be. We are not talking about a hell of a lot of complaints, but the complaints in question are serious and they deserve to be taken seriously.

This would not take resources away from the Hills Fleurieu area. There is no reason it would, because it has a very small group of people. In fact, I would argue that it would enable the resources currently in the Hills Fleurieu area to be operated more efficiently because they would not have to spend more than an hour in a round trip just to attend at a situation in Woodforde or Teringie—half an hour there and half an hour back at the very least. Rather than being on the road to Woodforde or Teringie, that car could be on the road to somewhere within the Hills Fleurieu area, the Hills Fleurieu community, in which the vast majority of Woodforde and Teringie residents would not count themselves.

I urge the government to think about this. Obviously it is going to vote against this motion today, but that does not mean that it cannot still decide to fix it when there is not a vote on the floor of the house. I hope the minister will seriously consider that. We will also write to the police commissioner again to ask him to do so as well.

The house divided on the motion:

AYES (15)
Chapman, V.A. Evans, I.F. Gardner, J.A.W. (teller)
Goldsworthy, M.R. Griffiths, S.P. Marshall, S.S.
McFetridge, D. Pederick, A.S. Pengilly, M.
Sanderson, R. Treloar, P.A. van Holst Pellekaan, D.C.
Venning, I.H. Whetstone, T.J. Williams, M.R.
NOES (24)
Atkinson, M.J. Bedford, F.E. Bettison. Z.L.
Bignell, L.W. Brock, G.G. Caica, P.
Close, S.E. Conlon, P.F. Fox, C.C.
Geraghty, R.K. Hill, J.D. Kenyon, T.R.
Key, S.W. Koutsantonis, A. Odenwalder, L.K.
Pegler, D.W. Piccolo, T. Rankine, J.M. (teller)
Rau, J.R. Sibbons, A.L. Snelling, J.J.
Thompson, M.G. Vlahos, L.A. Wright, M.J.
PAIRS (6)
Redmond, I.M. Weatherill, J.W.
Hamilton-Smith, M.L.J. O'Brien, M.F.
Pisoni, D.G. Portolesi, G.

Majority of 9 for the noes.

Motion thus negatived.

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