Western Australia's Labor Party has launched its re-election campaign with a heavy focus on law and order, promising a series of tough-on-crime policies. But are these measures enough to address the root causes of crime, or will they simply provide a temporary illusion of safety?
The opening week-and-a-half of Labor's re-election campaign has had a clear and unsurprising focus: law and order . Of the party's 10 major announcements over the past week, four have been about trying to improve community safety through new laws. First came the pledge to crack down on hoons and anti-social behaviour, complete with a noise-sensitive camera trial and criminalising 'posting and boasting' about crime online.
Last week Premier Roger Cook and Minister for Family and Domestic Violence Prevention Sabine Winton announced a raft of new laws to help combat the problem. And then yesterday Labor turned its attention to parole laws, promising to make 'life mean life' by imposing lifelong conditions on anyone handed a life sentence who's later released. Each move, according to Labor, is meant to increase community safety by taking a more hardline approach — and at first glance the policies seem like they'll do that. But each tends to focus on the symptoms of an issue — like the offences themselves — rather than why people are offending. It's why experts are warning this latest tough-on-crime strategy will do little more than give people a false sense of security in the short term, without preventing future crime. 'They need to take a preventative approach when it comes to people who might be at risk,' Marilyn Bromberg from the University of Western Australia's law school said. 'When you put people in prison, that makes it more likely that they will commit criminal offences in the future.' That's true of adult prisons, where last year 37 per cent of prisoners returned within two years, and youth detention, where 47 per cent of detainees were back behind bars over the same period. Labor can point to some rehabilitation and prevention-focused policies it has either implemented (like improvements in youth detention and the family-focused Target 120 program) or promising if it wins in March. Yesterday it announced $12.5 million for a new community sport hub in Bellevue, which would benefit the Binar Futures program. 'What Binar provides is an environment where they can engage in a fun, positive activity, be mentored without even realising and then find themselves on a positive pathway and make a good contribution,' Corrective Services Minister Paul Papalia said when announcing the funding, promising there would be more money for similar programs announced soon. 'You don't want young people, young Western Australians, to find their ways into the justice pathway. But it is a drop in the ocean and will attract far less airtime and newspaper column inches than the harsher laws Labor is planning.Lawyers, advocates and the police union believe a WA Labor promise to put some of the state's most serious young offenders on trial within 28 days of being charged is impossible. Dr Bromberg said Labor's proposals would do little beyond locking people up after they offend because many crimes are committed without much thought. 'If someone is going to commit a crime, are they really going to stop and think: I'm going to get a longer penalty, a longer sentence, so I'm not going to commit this crime?' she said. But that doesn't change the feeling many of us get from being told our safety is under threat and will be fixed with more laws — or how hard it is to convince voters a longer-term approach is the better way to go. 'How do you prove that a crime wasn't committed because you worked hard at an individual level, in say youth facilities and youth programs?' University of Notre Dame politics professor Martin Drum said. Political analyst Martin Drum says Labor's announcement of its tough-on-crime election pledges will make it tough for the opposition to shape debate on the issue. 'Whereas if there's a headline awful, atrocious crime, then the response to that and the sentencing of that is newsworthy at the time and it garners a lot more coverage,' where more long-standing and publicly debated issues with juvenile crime dominated elections last year and were credited with delivering conservative parties victories in both polls. 'There's no question they'll have an eye to that, and I think that's all part of their thinking,' Professor Drum said. 'We've continued to make sure that we put in laws and policies that keep the community safe,' was his answer. 'I hope that's the case,' Shadow Attorney-General Nick Goiran said yesterday. So far, the Liberals' focus has been on boosting the number of police officers on the beat and in specialised roles, rather than new laws. Professor Drum said the timing of Labor's announcements showed two things about its strategy on law and order. Never before in Australia has a state government had so much political power with so much wealth at its disposal. What does Labor have to show for its total control? 'If the opposition runs hard on law and order, then they can say they're coming second to the party and that they've already thought of these things,' he said
LAW AND ORDER CRIME ELECTION CAMPAIGN LABOR PARTY WESTERN AUSTRALIA REHABILITATION PREVENTION
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