November 1998 Volume 79 Number 11 "serving the protectors"
Police Bill Engendered Mistrust: Shadow Minister
By Brett Williams

Shadow Police Minister, Patrick Conlon: “This government has absolutely lost the way with the police force.”

The police bill recently before Parliament implied that South Australian police weren’t trustworthy, according to Opposition police spokesman, Patrick Conlon.

After the ALP and Democrats won major amendments to the bill in August, Conlon said that SA’s police officers had a right to feel insulted.

“If I were a police officer, doing the very difficult job that they do, I’d be pretty peeved - and I think they were,” he said.

“Police were calling (our electorate offices) and saying: ‘This is a terrible bill. Labor’s doing the right thing (opposing it).’ ”

Through the bill, the Olsen government sought to:

• Introduce contract employment for those of or above senior constable rank.
• Increase the commissioner’s powers to dismiss, transfer or demote officers for unsatisfactory performance.
• Remove the right to appeal over promotion and discipline.
• Lower the burden of proof from beyond reasonable doubt to the balance of probabilities in disciplinary proceedings.

Conlon said these aspects of the bill were “very serious defects”.

The Police Association lobbied State politicians and launched an intensive campaign against the bill through newspaper advertisements, media interviews and petitions.

Described by some as the commissioner’s wish list, the bill never became law in its original form.

The near-limitless power which the bill would have delivered to Commissioner Mal Hyde had greatly concerned Conlon. He said one could only assume it was something Hyde “desired and actively sought”.

“Like any head of a department, you can’t blame a bloke for asking for what he wants,” Conlon said. “But the minister should have exercised a little more caution about giving it to him.

“It created, in our view, a tremendous opportunity for cronyism. If you’ve read the Fitzgerald report, you’d have to wonder, after what you saw from the commissioner up there, why on earth you would contemplate a model that put that much authority in one person’s hands.”

Conlon said the Association’s campaign was outstanding. “It certainly did frighten an awful lot of Liberal backbenchers,” he said.

“It was a strange sight to see Liberals in the House get up and speak in favour of the bill, while actually apologizing for it to try to save their ‘bacon’ in their own seats.”

Conlon, the member for Elder, said the government’s handling of the bill was flawed from start to finish.

“To have a minister halfway through debate in the Lower House acknowledge that he needs to have the bill amended raises the question of why it was ever there in that shape in the first place,” he said.

“This government has absolutely lost the way with the police force. I can only assume they simply don’t understand the sorts of pressures the police are under. They don’t seem to get it at all.”

Conlon believes that, had the bill been passed in its original form, it would have damaged relations between police and the public. “The community has to place trust in the police,” he said.

“You can’t have a healthy police force when you’ve created some sort of low-trust relationship in the legislation.

“One of the arguments we used very strongly in Parliament is that the South Australian police force is the best in the country. If you have that, and it’s such an important institution, why would you risk it with an entirely new managerial style?”

To Conlon, the increased control and discipline embodied in the bill addressed “problems that didn’t exist”. He believes that some problems exist within SAPOL (South Australia Police) but insists that they’re of the government’s own making.

His view of the police bill was partly formed by a conversation with one of his constituents - a police officer with 18 years’ service. The officer told Conlon that he now wishes he’d joined the fire service instead of SAPOL.

“It’s very disappointing for me to talk to police officers who have lost so much morale,” he said. “I think the police feel that they’re getting a lack of support from the State government over the last five or six years.

“Those are the sorts of problems we might have addressed (in Parliament). Instead of the police bill, we might have increased the police budget instead of cutting it by $4 million.

“(The bill) was more a personal sort of viewpoint about how a police force should be run.”