HON GIZ WATSON (North Metropolitan) [ 2.22 pm ]: The Greens (WA) will also support the bill. These amendments will tighten the necessary controls within the security and related activities sector. We do not consider the bill to be problematic; if anything, it probably does not go far enough. I was interested to hear Hon Peter Collier suggest that a possible reason for it not going far enough is that it has been in the pipeline for a long time. The purpose of the bill is to tighten the security industry, and provision will be made for some offences to disqualify a person from working in the industry. A fingerprint database will be required, and although I am not a great fan of forensic databases, it is interesting to note that there has been no move to include DNA, as DNA is flagged as being a great tool in criminal matters. However, I am not advocating DNA testing for potential security guards. I notice Hon Bruce Donaldson is looking at me with interest on this matter!
It is obviously a sector in which people are accorded extraordinary powers, and there is arguably a parallel with the powers provided to police officers. If I remember correctly, one of the requirements for potential police officers is that DNA is kept on a database, so that is an interesting differentiation. The bill will also require an additional licence for unarmed security guards and drug testing for security guards armed with a baton or firearm. It is interesting that the bill does not include alcohol testing, but provides for testing for other drugs. I think that is a fairly arbitrary differentiation. If the intention is to ensure that people are not drug affected in their workplace—this workplace has a significant impact on the safety of members of the public—it is unusual that provision has not been made for alcohol testing. One could pass a test for amphetamines, steroids or whatever else, but still have a significant level of alcohol in one’s system.
Hon Peter Collier : In that industry, it’s highly likely.
Hon GIZ WATSON : It is highly possible, given the location of some of these workplaces, such as the doorway of a nightclub. At a policy level I would be interested to know why the government has not included testing for alcohol. As a matter of policy, the Greens (WA) are not in favour of across-the-board random drug testing, but the threshold should apply when people are working in an area in which they are likely to pose an occupational health and safety risk. I think that people working in this sector would certainly fall within that category. If they are affected by alcohol or other drugs—even prescription drugs—they pose a significant risk to the public. The bill includes a code of conduct, including whether a person belongs to an industry association. Compliance officers are to investigate offences, and there is provision for a 100-point proof of identification system for people seeking licences. There are increased fines for offences that are prescribed within the legislation, and additional information can be required of applicants who have resided overseas within the past five years or have been overseas for more than 12 months. That is an attempt to address the issue raised by Hon Peter Collier about our current preoccupation with alleged terrorism.
I note that the bill is supported by the government’s Security Industry Advisory Council, which comprises representatives from the police, security and related industries, and consumer and community employees. I also received a letter of support from the industry council, in which it sought rapid passage of the bill. We would have been happy to do so when the letter was sent, but this is the first time we have debated the bill, so we are happy to deal with this as expeditiously as possible.
I will make some general comments about trends in this sector. This is an opportunity to ask some pertinent questions. I was not a member of Parliament when the original bill passed in 1996; it was just before I came in. I took some time to look at trends in the sector. I think it is pertinent to this debate, particularly in light of comments about whether this legislation is keeping pace with the trends and characteristics of the sector, to draw members’ attention to a paper written by Associate Professor Rick Sarre from the University of South Australia entitled “Private Police: The Future of Policing and the Broader Regulatory Framework”. The paper was presented at the Current Issues in Regulation: Enforcement and Compliance conference convened by the Australian Institute of Criminology in conjunction with the regulatory institutions network, the Australian National University and the division of business and enterprise at the University of South Australia , held in Melbourne on 2-3 September 2002. The paper states —
There is a contemporary trend towards societies embracing a range of regulatory options—a ‘co-production of regulation’—in which interested persons all play a role in the maintenance of order and enforcement of the law. Peter Grabosky calls this phenomenon a “quasi-regulatory relationship for mutual benefit”, while Ian Ayres and John Braithwaite refer to a “regulatory tripartism” of government officers, self-policed entities and public interest groups in the process of regulation. More recently, David Bayley and Clifford Shearing have coined the term “regulatory multi-lateralisation” in exploring similar themes.
Each of these concepts hovers around the same phenomena. Regulation of activities (be they the activities of corporations, businesses or individuals) is now being carried out more and more by means of agencies other than those empowered under ‘police’ legislation.
He then goes on to state —
This ‘mix’ is part of a trend away from the ‘state as commander’ style of law enforcement, towards a ‘state as facilitator’ style of social, environmental and business regulation.
Rick Sarre then quotes David Bayley in the following terms —
Security is being provided increasingly by commercial firms through the market, by businesses to their own employees and customers, and by private residential communities. Volunteers . . . have also been encouraged to share responsibility for public safety with the public police, as in Neighbourhood Watch, citizens’ patrols, and community crime prevention councils. . . . [This involves] the relocation of authority, either to non-state auspices altogether or to lower levels of government. Multilateralisation as well as devolution involve the reconstruction of criminal justice in decentralised ways so that it responds to local needs, reflects local morality, and takes advantage of local knowledge.
In the same paper he goes on to state —
. . . given the dispersal of policing and surveillance activities undertaken by a vast array of control agents, the nature of ‘policing’, certainly as it may formerly have been understood, has changed irrevocably.
On the issue of engaging private security personnel in policing he states the following —
Modern security and order maintenance is now undertaken on a daily basis by a host of private personnel, security operatives and other licensed and unlicensed officers. These people may be working for government agencies or government-owned enterprises, private security operations or private companies, and they all exercise some degree of enforceable power over others. Indeed, private providers alternative to public police, in terms of numbers of personnel and annual expenditures at the very least, now dominate the ‘order maintenance’ landscape in Australia , and many other nations as well. All of this is not particularly surprising, given that the publicly funded agents of order maintenance that were initiated and grew during the nineteenth century development of modern policing never really eradicated the private forms of policing that had preceded them.
The world market for private, contractual security and policing services grows rapidly. There are now many public and private ‘order maintenance’ options readily taken up by public and private agencies and individuals alike. As Philip Stenning writes:
[I]t is now almost impossible to identify any function or responsibility of the public police which is not, somewhere and under some circumstances, assumed and performed by private police in democratic societies.
The dichotomy between “public” and “private” police and policing is no longer clear, if it ever was. Indeed, the distinction between public and private policing operatives and operations continues to blur irrevocably. New terms have been coined to describe what is under observation, such as a ‘pluralisation’ of policing, ‘hybrid policing’, or ‘continuum of activity’, a ‘security quilt’, ‘parapolicing’, ‘greying’ of policing, a ‘fragmentation of policing’, and a ‘mixed economy’ of protection. Even the term ‘security personnel’ has lost some currency. Two researchers at least now refer to security operatives as ‘social control entrepreneurs’.
I just love that —
People and businesses more generally use private police personnel for a range of different reasons, both ideological and practical. Suspicions of government, profit, and vigilantism feature amongst them. So pervasive is the mix today that policing theorists are moving beyond the public/private debate, preferring to review models of complementarity (“how would we like the future to look?”) rather than engaging in an ideological dialectic
. . .
This theme has been reiterated by Brian Forst:
The great contemporary challenge confronting public safety . . . is not primarily to decide whether privatization is a good thing. It is to find a way to shape and coordinate our resources and energies to secure the safety of those quarters of society that are least able to afford effective security, public or private. Wealthy communities can afford to take care of themselves both publicly and privately, and they do so. Poor people, especially minorities living in areas with the highest concentrations of crime, cannot. Sworn police officers must be made available in sufficient numbers and with effective systems of accountability to ensure that those areas are adequately served and protected.
In conclusion, the paper states —
We live in an era of public and private regulatory flux. The upshot of this is a society in which policing is now conducted not just by those people commonly referred to as ‘the police’ but by a host of private and non-government operatives who use a range of empowerment tools and resources at their disposal, not just the criminal law. This trend is set to continue. We must remain committed to observing and monitoring these trends. In considering the public policy ramifications of diverse policing models and an expansion of surveillance, one should remain mindful of the dictum that society should strive for those outcomes that deliver the greatest overall freedom for the public as a whole. The freedom from anti-social conduct that we all desire should not come at any price.
I also refer to a trends and issues paper from the Australian Institute of Criminology that addresses the same subject. This paper is slightly older—it was published in 1998—so some of the observations may be a little out of date, but I still think the paper is relevant. This paper is entitled “Regulating Private Security in Australia ” and is written by Tim Prenzler and Rick Sarre, who is also the author of the previous paper I quoted from. This paper, which was published in November 1998, states —
Private security is a major industry in Australia and security services affect almost all aspects of people’s lives.
Then it gives an interesting figure —
There are twice as many private security operatives in Australia as there are police.
That figure was relevant in 1998, and I can only assume, given the trend, that that figure is probably even more disproportionate now. The paper goes on to state —
The security industry in Australia has tended to follow international trends in its development and, like its overseas counterparts, appears to have enjoyed a period of intensive growth in the 1970s and 1980s.
The paper further states —
State-based licensing figures show a much larger industry than is apparent from ABS data, and it is clear that security operatives outnumber conventional police by at least two to one as a result of the growth of the preceding decades . . . Police numbers have not declined relative to population, but have been outstripped by security.
The statistics do not reflect a change in the number of police per head of population over that time. The paper then states —
The gap would be considerably wider if one were to include unlicensed personnel.
. . .
Academic studies and media reports tend to focus on “private” or “contract” security. This sector constitutes the larger part of the industry, but the situation is more complex than the stereotype suggests. A large number of government agencies, businesses and educational enterprises employ their own security staff. This public “in-house” sector receives very little attention. Its functions are similar to those of in-house security in the private sector, the most noticeable example being loss prevention officers in the retail sector.
. . .
A further dimension of complexity relates to the functions of security personnel. These are highly diverse, with wide differences in the types of tasks performed and the levels of technical or interpersonal skills required.
. . .
Expansion has been attributed to a number of factors. Increasing crime during the 1970s and 1980s was facilitated by lifestyles that shifted much family activity away from the home, that increased population densities, and that increased the number and availability of goods which are easily stolen and easily converted to cash. In other words, a decrease in guardianship coincided with a large increase in the number and value of targets . . . There has also been greater physical separation between commercial, industrial and residential areas and a consequent reduction in “natural surveillance”. New security concerns have also developed in areas as diverse as terrorism and threats to electronic data.
. . .
These circumstances have created a trend towards individuals and corporations providing their own security. Self-provision of security is also reflective of the immediate benefits in crime prevention achieved through the application of “situational” crime prevention principles. These involve strategies designed to suit the particular vulnerabilities and needs of an organisation . . . or strategies that employ what has become known as Crime Prevention . . .
The large, but often hidden, presence of security services raises questions about the implications of the growth of social control by “non-police” agencies. It has been argued, for example, that increased privatisation of security will produce “two justice systems”: a better service for those able to pay and a publicly funded inferior service for those unable to pay . . .
. . .
There has also been criticism of the industry for disregarding people’s legal rights; for example, allegations of security guards harassing young people in public places.
I have certainly witnessed that —
Moreover, the availability and relatively low price of some security devices—along with the aggressive advertising that goes with them—are said to contribute to a “fortress society”, exploiting fear of crime and driving people indoors behind bars. Security technology, such as surveillance cameras, are seen as invading privacy and over-regulating contemporary society.
. . .
Apart from the general issue of privatisation, allegations of impropriety are also frequently made against the industry.
. . .
In 1994 the Victorian Deputy Registrar for Private Agents claimed that security firms “have very poor selection procedures. They lack any real supervisory hierarchy. People are sent out on the job and not seen again until they return. There are extremely poor standards in respect to training” . . . Similarly, a New South Wales Police inquiry cited firearms instructors’ views that the one day of weapons instruction required for security guards was “totally inadequate” . . . Such concerns have been expressed from within the industry as well as from without . . . and the 1990s has seen a number of inquiries revealing serious problems in some sections of the industry, . . .
He goes on to list a number of those concerns.
This paper also contains an interesting table on page 5, which, in tabular form, identifies the licensed security categories covered by legislation in each state and territory. I might ask a specific question about this matter, and I will provide a copy of the chart for the minister. If the chart is accurate, it would seem a number of categories covered by licensing legislation in other states—South Australia and New South Wales seem to have the most comprehensive licence categories—are not covered in Western Australia. According to this chart, Western Australia , does not license three areas—in-house guards, bodyguards and trainers. New South Wales has licence requirements for all three categories and South Australia has requirements for two of them.
I want to refer to one further article before I speak more specifically about the bill. This article, by Paul Wilson, is entitled “The Australian Private Security Industry: The Need For Accountability, Regulation and Professionalism”. I want to cover a few issues raised in the article. Referring to the trend of the “fear of crime as well as crime itself”, Mr Wilson writes —
Despite assertions to the contrary Australians are not overwhelmed by crime. It is true that some offences—breaking and entering offences, car theft (in some States) and serious assault have increased. On the other hand, our murder rate has remained fairly constant over the last fifty years. Regardless of what the trends in crime actually are, the fear about crime has, for a variety of reasons, outstripped the reality surrounding its growth.
However, because of drugs, a high youth unemployment rate and a dramatic proliferation of weapons in the community, we can expect property offences, including armed robbery, to increase markedly over the next decade. As a result, public policing will be overstretched and increasingly the private sector will be asked to take on more and more of what used to be police responsibility.
Unfortunately, the amount of crime will be exaggerated by both public and private police in an effort to obtain more state-provided and corporate funds for policing and security. This emphasis on exaggerating crime will be increased by opportunistic political parties who are determined to win votes on a “law and order” platform. The recent Queensland State election is a classic example of this trend.
He then goes on to talk about the “four social forces”, explaining —
These four social forces—the move from an industrialised to an information society, a growth in crime and the fear of crime, cuts in public funding and the move towards “self-help”, the rapid development of land use for private commercial development—are already fuelling a burgeoning private security industry. Paradoxically, though experts agree that the industry has increased considerably in recent years, no-one has accurately estimated how many people actually work in what is generically called the private security industry.
. . .
It is estimated that nationally there could well be between 30,000 and 57,000 guards/watchmen/patrolmen . . . The Australian Bureau of Statistics in their 1987-88 census estimated that there are about 1,320 enterprises, employing over 28,000 people and generating a turnover of about $100 million . . .
This is a growth sector, and I think members would be aware of that on at least an anecdotal level. I have considerable concerns about this trend. I know that over the past decade the debate about private security and, in some cases, certain councils engaging private security patrols has focused on a much bigger question: who should be doing the policing and how much control is being exercised over the security sector?
This is an interesting area. The Greens (WA) do not oppose the bill because it is about imposing tighter controls. However, we want to put on the record that we are very concerned about the ongoing trend in governance resulting in the devolution, or deregulation, of the policing function to private companies and individuals. This is a very tricky area in which to get the required controls and management correct. In particular, I strongly object to private security officers carrying firearms. I do not think it should be allowed in our community; the greater the proliferation of firearms, the greater the chance of accidental fatalities in the community.
The security industry has the authority to give people extraordinary authority over other people. The activities of security officers can affect the safety of both individuals and crowds comprising large numbers of members of the public, some of whom may be young or unwell or otherwise vulnerable. I acknowledge the work of Paul Wilson and especially his 1992 paper from which I have just quoted, and the other papers from the Australian Institute of Criminology that provide a statistical and, I guess, an evidential basis for what should be the policy and legislative direction of all political parties. However, more often than not, we see law and order legislation that is based not on any evidence but rather on the votes that can be gained from the crude law and order debate that often preoccupies both the major parties and the media.
The extraordinary authority given to employees in the industry merits a cautious approach towards granting that authority and a strong regulatory system aimed at ensuring that the authority, once granted, is appropriately exercised. The aim must be to promote effectiveness and accountability and prevent unnecessary or inappropriate use of this power. Unlike the police, the private security industry is not publicly accountable and lacks the level of public and private scrutiny to which the police are exposed. Dangers to the public include people with criminal records, non-existent services, thuggery, incompetent burglary alarm installers, quotes for security by bogus firms that use the opportunity to case the premises for a later burglary, and assessments affected by drugs. Better regulation offers not only better safety for the public who increasingly come into contact with this sector, but also better value for money for the companies who hire particular security services.
I have a few comments about particular clauses in the Security and Related Activities (Control) Amendment Bill; however, I do not wish to comment extensively. Proposed section 4A deals with the issue of disqualifying offences. The offences that attract disqualification will be prescribed. The explanatory memorandum indicates that it is intended that drug offences will be prescribed offences. At this point I raise the question of disqualification as it relates to a person convicted of an offence related to drugs. Actually, my question relates to drugs and alcohol; it does not relate to this clause.
My next concern relates to an aspect of retrospectivity in the bill and findings of guilt on or before 1 January 1996 . I would like the minister to indicate why retrospectivity is included.
We support clause 31, which amends section 47 to require further information. It is a safeguard, in that the type of information required is specified—for example, to establish identity, time spent overseas, why and with whom, and any criminal record. It is more specific than the current section in the act so it is probably an improvement from the perspective of the industry as well as concerns about public safety.
Part 9 of the act deals with drug testing. The act currently provides for random drug testing of licensed crowd controllers. Failure without reasonable excuse to provide a sample and failing a test means a person’s licence may be revoked. The bill extends the application of this part from crowd controllers to licensees, defined by clause 59, to mean holders of crowd control licences or a security officer’s licence with an endorsement under section 24 or 26 or a security officer’s licence and a permit under section 25. Sections 24 to 26 relate to carrying firearms or batons. Was it considered that random testing should also include the blood alcohol level? There is an interesting parallel here. We just passed legislation in this place that provided for roadside drug testing of people in control of a motor vehicle. Provisions that have been active for a long time deal with people who have alcohol in their system. The judgement and attention that is required to be in control of a motor vehicle are not similar to the attention and judgement that should be required of a bouncer at a nightclub or a person doing crowd control at various public events. We want to be absolutely sure that those people are not affected by any drugs, including the most prevalent drug, which is alcohol. I would be interested to know whether that was considered and, if so, why it was not included.
My final comment relates to the fact that this bill has taken a long time to come to Parliament for consideration. Arguably, there are probably other trends and changes in the sector that we could be contemplating and dealing with now. When is it intended that there be another review of this act? Will there be a regular process of ensuring that this type of legislation is kept as up to date as possible in terms of trends and ensuring that Parliament is mindful of the public safety concerns that relate to this sector? With those comments, the Greens support the bill.