Mr BEAZLEY (9:42 PM) —I intervene only very briefly in this debate on the Proceeds of Crime Bill 2002 but I enjoy the opportunity to do so because I do not want to leave the honourable member for Denison alone, with an obligation on himself to blow his own trumpet in this regard, but to offer him words of praise. He indeed can take some pride in the legislation that has been introduced tonight. He has been advocating this measure for a substantial period of time. He did it from our front bench in this parliament. He did it, importantly, as part of a package that was an approach to a federal government involvement with crime in dealing with problems which impact very much on the lives of the ordinary Australian.

He has presented here tonight an excellent theoretical underpinning for the actions he has undertaken. It is uniquely, I think, in the Australian Labor Party that we do find such people—such people who take seriously their obligation not only to respond to what they see as needs in the community around them but who have a set of values and a set of approaches that ensure that as they respond, critical, theoretical and practical underpinnings of our society are not undermined. In other words, they do not sleepwalk into dealings with the problems of crime. They walk into dealing with it on a basis of principle, and with a sense of confidence that enables all members of the community, no matter what their perspectives might be, to be assured that their concerns about the character of our community are not being undermined whilst at the same time we are dealing with very serious issues indeed.

Whilst this is broadly and generally being discussed here as a countermeasure to those who profit from serious organised criminal activities across the board, our approach when in opposition has been very much associated with a broad approach that we have always had to the issue of drugs in our community. The targets of the legislation that we brought into this place initially, which was proposed by the member for Denison, who was then a frontbencher, were very much those who were associated with profiting from one of the most evil trades known to humanity—one of the trades that most strikes fear into the heart of the average Australian family member. There is enormous confusion in the community about whether or not principles of law and the underpinnings of the enforcement of law actually serve their interests or have been corrupted, or are helpless in the face of its prevalence. They do hate the idea that there are people in this community who benefit from the misery of, often, their own children or people known to them.

As I spoke around the country about these matters, I was enormously impressed that, when you went into a gathering of Australians—and mostly there were 400 or 500 people at the community meetings I held—and asked them whether or not they, their families or people known to them had experienced the ravages caused by those criminals through the distribution of drugs in the community, there was scarcely a hand not raised. So severe was—and still is—the problem, as far as they were concerned, that they were prepared to indicate their fears publicly in that fashion. We Australians are a reticent people, oddly enough. We like to think that we are not but the truth is that we are. We do not like to push ourselves forward in public. That is another thing you notice when you are a politician: when you go to address a public meeting, the back is always crammed and the front row is always empty. We are reticent people just about all the time, except when we are barracking at a sporting venue. Therefore, to get that sort of response from the community was not only interesting but also an indication that there are serious issues here to be addressed.

With the help of people like the member for Denison, our then spokesperson on health who is now the Deputy Leader of the Australian Labor Party, and others who had a passionate interest in these matters, such as our shadow minister for defence in relation to the coastguard, we developed what we thought was a complete approach that did not walk away from federal responsibilities to hide behind the skirts of the states and the states' primary responsibility for operation of criminal law. We made absolutely certain that, as far as the general public was concerned, we accepted responsibility. We at the federal level were prepared to accept responsibility for what was happening to them on their streets and not simply duckshove it to the various state administrations, under-resourced as they often are to handle these particular problems.

Whilst we see, and are dealing with here, some of the profits that flow from organised crime—and I think here particularly of the drug trade, although I understand it is broader than that—what ordinary Australians experience, in regard to the activities of those who will be depleted of their profits by this going ultimately through the parliament, is what happens to them when they lose their cars and what happens to them, more worryingly, when their homes are broken into, particularly when they are broken into while they are in them. More than 70 per cent of those crimes are a product of supporting a drug habit or enhancing the financial underpinnings of a drug sale. About 70 per cent of what is experienced by the ordinary members of the community as they confront crime is a product of a set of events which, at its apex, has somebody making a very large amount of money indeed. We also acknowledge, of course, that the federal government is responsible for the barrier. So we have a responsibility at the community level and we have a responsibility at the barrier.

I praise the member for Denison, who did a great deal of work on the proposition we put forward for a coastguard. That is a very important attribute of real border protection: an interception at the barrier. We, of course, discussed in the last election campaign our proposition on a coastguard, essentially within the context of border protection against illegal migrants. The truth is that most of them can be spotted and dealt with—not so the activities of those who are importing drugs into this country. We need a coastguard for effective constabulary activities by the federal government to prevent penetration of our coastline and our borders by those with a criminal intent, by those who seek to deplete our fisheries resources or whatever. So that was also part of this approach that included a proposition by the member for Denison for the confiscation of the proceeds of organised crime.

We wanted be tough, hard and ruthless with those who profited; we wanted to be tough, hard and ruthless with those who sought to import it; we wanted to be tough, hard and ruthless with those who were threatening our citizens and our children on the streets. As for those who, at the end of the day, found themselves victims of the activity of these criminals, we wanted to keep them alive. We had a total approach which ensured that the community could reach out to those who were suffering the consequences and deal with them as people with essentially a health problem and not a crime problem, by keeping them alive—since usually in the context of the times when we put this approach forward, they killed themselves as a result of their heroin addiction—so that they could be effectively drawn out of their addiction without being criminalised.

Those who were responsible for putting them in that situation got away with absolutely nothing. Preferably, they would not get away with their freedom but even if they got away with their freedom they would not get away with their profits. It was a total approach—a Commonwealth acceptance of responsibility for making our community a safer place. Community safety zones were part of it. Associated with those community safety zones, there will be more Federal Police to liaise in community areas to backup the often overrun resources of our state police forces and to provide better assistance to the state police forces themselves. I hope, as the parliament debates this over the course of the next little while here and in the other place, there is some reflection of the variety of uses to which this law will be put in strategising how we deal with some of the problems which most worry the minds of our fellow Australians.

In the six years we have been here, we have been a constructive opposition. We have had ideas. The government has often been obliged to respond to those ideas. Last year was so much the year of the response. We actually have a huge budget deficit in this particular year, largely because the government sought to respond in an almost sleepwalking fashion to initiatives that we put forward in the area of Defence or to criticisms that we made, for example, of their failure to keep a promise that they put forward on ensuring the GST did not impact upon the price of petrol at the pump and to ideas on our part for a knowledge nation and the need to improve the educational base of our society, the research and development capability of our private industries, investment in research and our public institutions. All these sorts of things the government was being continually forced to address because we were initiating from opposition.

We are often said by our political opponents to have no policy. We know what it is like to have no policy now. There is not much circulating in the belfry of this government that can be seen as likely to be applicable for the next three years. We might as well have a double dissolution election 12 months from now. We sure as hell do not have before us enough to keep this parliament occupied for the next three years. The government might as well say, `Sorry, we didn't have an idea. Perhaps we'd better have another election and we'll have a few ideas for that one.'

But one of the positions we put forward and advocated in the last parliament has at last been picked up in this parliament. It was the one that was not picked up, unlike the others that I have mentioned, in the previous parliament. The fact that belatedly we have come to it now is a good thing. But those who are responsible for its origins ought to receive due praise in this place and one of them happens to have been sitting in here and participating in the debate tonight, and that is the honourable member for Denison.