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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-02-08 Daily Xml
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South Australia Police

Mr TELFER (Flinders) (14:37): My question is to the Minister for Police. Has the Premier's Taskforce into policing completed its review and, if so, when will their findings and recommendations be made public? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr TELFER: It has now been more than 18 months since that taskforce was established.

The Hon. J.K. SZAKACS (Cheltenham—Minister for Police, Emergency Services and Correctional Services) (14:37): I thank the member for his question. The taskforce has been a matter that we have delivered proudly as an election commitment made by the Premier, hence the title of the Premier's Taskforce. Off the top of my head, I can't give a date on that matter for the member's benefit. That is still obviously a matter that will be subject to cabinet considerations.

What I can inform the member of—and I know that he is more than aware of some of the work we have been doing in this space—is that we have been taking some action on matters that have been raised throughout our short time in government. It was very clear on coming to government just how useful and able we could be as a government to free up some of the more historic roles undertaken by police: things like conveying remandees, cell guards and hospital guards. Almost immediately, in our second budget, we employed 189 new sworn police security officers. Those sworn police security officers were really strategically utilised across some of the COVID years and, of course, for those of us who have been in this place for some time, we know the excellent work that our PSOs do in this building alone.

What we have seen already as we have been accelerating employment of those sworn PSOs is the freeing up of police resourcing. Rather than being tied in really important work in cells or rather than being at bedsides, we have been able to get them moving. They are matters that were raised on coming to government and well ventilated in the broad-based work that we have been undertaking as part of this taskforce. What we haven't done is wait for cabinet consideration of the work that is ongoing for the next 10 to 15 years but act now, and that is exactly what we have been doing.

We have also been very proud—I think I have discussed this a little yesterday or the day before, subject to some of the members' questions—of our efforts as a government to invest in doubling the recruiting of police. Now is a great time to be a police officer. We recognise, unfortunately, during COVID there was a significant dip in the number of people who were applying to be police. What that meant was that, upon coming to government, we had a deficit of police, as we did in many other aspects of our workforce.

What we have been doing and what we have done is two things. First of all, we have actually said that we will put some money into this. Rather than asking our police to do more with less, we have actually invested heavily—a $94 million package in total—to get more police on our frontline to support the frontline and to support those additional 189 police and security officers. There will be 900 police through the Police Academy in the next three years. As I have already spoken about both publicly and in this place, we are actively recruiting in other jurisdictions—the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. The success so far, having only had our migration agreement approved by the federal government in mid-December, has been excellent. They are some of the matters that have been ventilated in the taskforce. We act now and, of course, with a very firm eye on the 10 to 15 years of which the taskforce's work was focused on.

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