It is a real pleasure and an honour to be here.
This is, as George points out, the inaugural meeting of the Law, Crime and Community Safety Council. This does deliver on a key election commitment to bring the politicians and the policing agencies together to talk through the issues that we are concerned about and to ensure that we are all working together in the same cause.
There is no more fundamental priority of government than to keep our community safe. Whether it’s the state government, or the Commonwealth government, keeping our community safe is our absolute priority and that’s why it’s important that all of us involved in community safety – Attorneys-General, Police Ministers, Police Commissioners, security agencies – should be represented around this table.
I am determined as the Prime Minister, George and Michael as Commonwealth Ministers, are determined to work with the states and territories to ensure that we have a national focus to crime fighting, particularly organised crime recognising that state borders should never be an impediment to catching criminals and protecting law abiding citizens.
We are blessed to live in a country where our streets are generally safe and our communities are generally strong. That’s not something that happens by accident; it happens because of the hard work of the people and the organisations that are represented around this table.
I am extraordinarily grateful to our law enforcement agencies, to our emergency services at every level. Whether it be the AFP, the state police forces, the Australian Crime Commission, the State Emergency Services - every one of these agencies and every one of the individuals serving with these agencies is doing a sterling job for the Australian people.
We can never be complacent because there are always new threats emerging and that’s why vigilance is always absolutely essential.
Right now we face serious challenges from international events and these new and emerging threats make it more important than ever that we work together to keep our borders secure and to keep our communities safe, to keep people who would do us harm under the closest possible supervision.
Our job is not just to keep the peace; our job is to enforce the law.
Our job is to take sides. Our job is to be on the side of the law abiding citizen, against those who would do law abiding citizens harm or against those who would exploit our generosity to do all of us harm.
A couple of Commonwealth initiatives I probably should mention: I’m very pleased that building on our pre-election commitments we have national anti-gang strike teams operational in most of the states and as a result of the establishment of these teams, AFP and state police are working together and are able to tap into the resources of the Australian Crime Commission, Customs, Immigration and Border Protection, the Department of Human Services and Centrelink.
Our $50 million Safer Streets Programme is being rolled out around the country so that local police and local communities are working together to target crime hotspots and tackle anti-social behaviour.
We’ve also dramatically increased funding to Customs to increase the inspections of international mail, air cargo, containers etcetera. We’re funding more advanced detection technology, extra detector dog teams and extra officers to support intelligence activities because we don’t just have to stop criminals coming into our country, we need to stop the means of criminal activity coming into our country.
There’s a lot that the Attorney and the Justice Minister will want to talk to you about today and I don’t want to pre-empt those discussions or steal their thunder, but I am pleased to announce today that Minister Keenan will in the next few weeks be bringing into our Parliament laws to introduce uniform minimum mandatory five-year jail terms for illegal firearms trafficking. We estimate that there’s about 10,000 illegal unregistered handguns in our country, up to a quarter of a million unregistered long arms in our country. Illegal guns are being imported and distributed throughout our country.
Light sentencing sends the wrong message. Criminals need to know that they will face the full severity of our law for their misdeeds, particularly because police officers are putting themselves at risk – at greater risk than would otherwise be the case because of these illegal firearms.
In coming weeks, as the Attorney has flagged, we will have more to say about other measures to tackle crime and secure our borders and in particular, to respond effectively to the threat posed by radicalised and militarised people seeking to re-enter Australia after Jihadist activities abroad.
There is a lot of heavy lifting that needs to be done to keep our borders secure and our streets safe.
The people in this room are doing the heavy lifting, they are leading the fight to ensure that our country is as safe as it can humanly can be, for law abiding Australians to go about their business.
I understand that the bulk of responsibility for law and order does rest with our state and territory colleagues, but we in Canberra – the Commonwealth Government – want to do whatever we reasonably can to support the good work that you do.
As the Attorney has just pointed out, I am here because the Commonwealth takes this task incredibly seriously, particularly at this time when international developments have implications for what might happen in this country.
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