WA Legal Service resists law and order push

WA Legal Service resists law and order push

By Anthony Benbow

PERTH — The WA Court Liberal government boasts a number of "firsts" in the law-and-order game. It was the first to conduct organised police operations against "loitering youth" (Operation Sweep, renamed Operation Family Values after vigorous protests by young people and civil libertarians) and also the first to imitate the US craze of "boot camps" in Australia.

According to Marti Noonan of the WA Youth Legal Service, the March 13 proclamation of the "Young Offenders Bill" will formally sanction the "Young Offenders Work Camp" being built at Laverton, a former mining town in the desert near Kalgoorlie, 900km east of Perth.

"Conditions offered to staff are very good", says Noonan. "They will have good salaries and two weeks on-two weeks off, fly in-fly out'. (These are conditions that much of the mining industry in the Pilbara lost years ago!)

However, the "Punishment Park" obsessions of the Court government are beginning to meet resistance. The announcement by WA attorney-general Cheryl Edwardes that she is to organise a "Coordinating Committee for Crime Prevention" to fight a supposed "youth crime wave" has led several of WA's legal services to consider setting up their own committee to call for community submissions in opposition to Edwardes' plans.

Meanwhile Operation Family Values is no longer being run as an operation with a public profile. Instead, the Orwellian Juvenile Aid Group, the police squad created specifically for Operation Sweep, continues to patrol central Perth, Northbridge and some suburbs, targeting youth at parks and amusement centres and threatening them with arrest if they do not immediately move on.

According to Noonan, JAG's work is being carried out under the Child Welfare Act and violates the intent of that law.

From GLW issue 180