Wednesday, 4 October 2023

Public Accounts and Estimates Committee

Report on the 2023–24 Budget Estimates

Brad BATTIN (Berwick) (10:14): I rise to speak on the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee report. It has been very interesting to have a chat with my good friend from Gippsland South over a period of time and also the members in the upper house in relation to this report and some of the issues, particularly focusing around Victoria Police. We have just had Police Remembrance Day, when I think everyone in this house would have joined together to support our local police but also to support our police management and those that have lost loved ones along the way. It is a tough job, and when you go down, you stand at those memorials and you speak to some of the families of lost loved ones in their time, you understand how difficult and dangerous the role is.

However, we all know it is an essential service. Without Victoria Police we would have many more issues here in our state. One of the things with Victoria Police is we know that as the population grows, Victorian police numbers need to grow with them. In the report, in 5.7, it goes through some of the key issues in Victoria Police numbers. One of the things that has been highlighted by the Chief Commissioner of Police is the fact that the attrition rate and the recruitment rate are not matching, and we have actually got more people leaving Victoria Police now than we have had in history and we are not recruiting at the same rate. The budget highlights – originally it was said by the government – that this was because they could not get people to apply and there were other issues in workforce stability and trying to get people to apply for many roles, not just Victoria Police. However, it appears from the budget to be a budget issue, because the budget has allocated in 2023–24 funding for a total of 502 police officers over a two-year period. At the same time Victoria Police are already 807 short, so they have got 807 vacancies on their rosters every day across this state. If you recruit 502 over a two-year period – and you do not need to be a mathematician – that still leaves us over 300 short. It used to be that this government, which was then the Andrews Labor government, would state every time they spoke about police numbers that these were new police – additional police numbers to what we had. If you are trying to catch up 807 and if you employ 807 over the next two years, you are at net zero – you have not recruited one new Victorian police officer to make an additional difference in our state.

What is the impact of that when you are not recruiting Victorian police? We see 24-hour stations being shut. We see a government trying to renegotiate the enterprise bargaining agreement with the Police Association Victoria to remove the requirement for one-man stations to remain as one-man stations. Currently if they want to move someone from a one-man station, they have to go through a process, and it has to be for things like a terrorism attack – it has to be a major incident. There has to be a genuine reason why you are going to make a small community – regional communities generally – more unsafe by removing the police officer they have. But the government want to remove that so they can move them around based on what is needed for rostering in other areas. So effectively because of the 807 short, larger regional towns or inner metropolitan areas that are short on police can now take people away from country areas and bring them into those areas just because they are short on the roster. It is simply not fair.

The impact of this is on our crime rate. Now, I am out in Casey. We have seen across the state that aggravated burglaries are up 40 per cent. This is the amount of times people are going into a home with a knife, a gun or other weapon whilst people are home to steal things from their house. I have said it in this place before. In the 2000s people would come home and their TV would be missing – someone had burgled their house. They would call the police – it was a cold offence – and they would go through and try and sort it out and try and convict whoever had committed that crime. Now we are seeing them come in with knives and guns. It is a more dangerous position for not just the police but the community, because the brazen acts of these criminals, where they are going into homes when people are there, is scary for people I know specifically in my community. But the scariest part about this is 55 per cent of crimes are going unsolved in the Casey area, so that means offenders are getting away with more, to commit more crimes. The only way to fix that is if the government fixes this budget black hole. We know that they have sent the state broke. We know they want to make cuts. We know they have got to adjust their budget to pay off debt long term. But you cannot do that at risk to community safety. Too many people in our community rely on the fact that when you call 000 because someone is in your house with a knife Victoria Police will be there as soon as possible, and currently that is not happening. I will continue to speak on this until such time as we get the police numbers we need to bring down the crime rate in Victoria.