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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-02-07 Daily Xml
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Crime in Regional Areas

Mr TELFER (Flinders) (15:05): My question is to the Minister for Police. What action is the minister taking to respond to crime levels in regional South Australia, including locations like Port Augusta, Port Lincoln and Ceduna?

The Hon. J.K. SZAKACS (Cheltenham—Minister for Police, Emergency Services and Correctional Services) (15:05): I thank the member for his question and, of course, his advocacy on behalf of his communities, as well as members on our side from regional communities. The good news is that I can advise the member that staffing levels in our regions are strong. There is natural fluctuation in staffing of SAPOL (in fact of any of our public sector agencies), but I was advised very recently in my meetings with SAPOL that those numbers in our regions are holding strong. Where there are the usual relocations in or out—or, in fact in many instances, promotions of really good people from our regions into positions across SAPOL—they are being advertised and filled. The thing that we can do the most is to ensure that our police have the police that they want, that they are funded for, on the frontline.

As I didn't get an opportunity in the previous question from the member that I began to speak to, I can elaborate more now. Not only are we asking to bring on more police—having developed and now executing a plan to do exactly that; we are bringing them on at double the rate that we saw when coming to government—but we are also going to international jurisdictions with similar cultures to us to immediately put a shot in the arm of the number of police we have on the frontline, and we are actually funding it.

We ask a lot of our police and our community asks a lot of our police. The job of policing is difficult, it is complex and, as I remarked on in my previous answer, the job of a cop is often dangerous. We know through tragic circumstances of the last few months that the most extraordinary trauma can happen and an innocent cop, an innocent officer, can go to work and be murdered—cold-blooded murder. We also see in far too many cases that police can be spat on, they can have their hair pulled, they can be assaulted by morons in our community who have absolutely no respect for the job that our police are doing.

In funding more police to get through the academy to get on the frontline, we are doing what police have asked us to do. We are doing it with new money—not what the former government did, which was ask so much of our police through the COVID pandemic but not give them any resourcing to pick up the pieces of an extraordinarily dramatic drop in applications. For a time there, people effectively stopped wanting to be police. What we have seen is a dramatic turnaround, where the number of applications coming into police has returned to what we expect of normal standards. The attrition rate of police has stabilised and I am advised is starting to decrease.

Mr Telfer: It's the highest it's ever been.

The Hon. J.K. SZAKACS: I hear comments, not interjections—I never respond to interjections—from those opposite about 'the highest it's ever been', well, we have amongst the lowest attrition of any police service in the country, and not by a little bit but a long way.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.K. SZAKACS: The more that those opposite want to pull apart the good work of police, the more that they want to pull apart the plan to bring more police onto the frontline, the more we will be resolved to standing up for our police and the extraordinary work they do.

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