That's what the then-Labor opposition told state parliament in 2009 when the Liberal government tried to give police the power to stop people in particular areas and search them without their consent, and without having a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing."This legislation is not the legislation that threw innocent people into Nazi concentration camps," one fresh-faced MP declared.
"Those laws that we were talking about then were related to stop and search for the presence of drugs. This is about … deterring people from carrying weapons that can kill people."The minister's laws don't go as far but will still allow wanding without suspicion, will punish people who refuse,The WA government will introduce knife laws it says will be "the toughest in the country", effectively allowing officers to scan people in any public place.
"We really need to be careful about being transparent as to why we're introducing these laws and they need to be based upon sound evidence," was the view of UWA Law School associate professor Meredith Blake.It's not because the rate of knife crime is increasing – Papalia and Commissioner Blanch said the rate was actually decreasing.
But the laws are unlikely to make a massive difference in that space, she said, because much of that violence happens behind closed doors."It is a small number of people who have taken to carrying knives, and as a consequence there has been some very high profile, very concerning and frightening events in the community," he said.
Papalia said "operational directives" to officers and public reporting of statistics around the use of the laws addressed any concerns about even unintentional discrimination."One suspects that it is a tough-on-crime approach, one which tends to be popular with voters," she said. , had resulted in around 70 searches between June last year and March, with 5 grams of cannabis and 0.8 grams of methylamphetamine seized to date.The question for that state, and WA, is whether that translates to making the community safer, or strays closer to the class of laws Papalia so strongly opposed not too long ago.