Looking for Laura

Broadcast on Radio National's Radio Eye at 2.00pm, Saturday October 5, 2002

Warning. This website contains content that some may find offensive. It contains strong language and descriptions of violence and sexual assault and is appropriate only for a mature audience.

It seems "Laura Norder" is always out there prowling our streets and the dark reaches of our subconscious mind. She is a heady mix of fact, fiction and fear and her influence is all pervasive - from the King of Talkback radio to the late night newsreader. But are we really less safe than before? Is the whole thing just fodder for irate columnists and a winner for the politicians?

Listen to the program, or have your say by adding your comments to our guestbook. Read the transcript of Looking for Laura.
Help listening with Real Audio

Looking for Laura is an investigation into the evolution of Australia's law and order culture, which has produced the largest prison population in our history. We hear peoples fears - real and imagined.

Looking for Laura: Transcript

Radio Eye: An investigation into one of the most powerful figures of our age, a figure dominating political debate in every state and federal election: "Laura Norder". Who is she? Where does she come from? Why is she sending record numbers to prison? How did she come to seduce so many politicians?

Politician: "Putting repeat offenders behind bars makes the place safer for the rest of us."

Talkback radio: "Hello."
"Hello, Allan. How are you? Look, I'd just like to speak about the sentence on these vicious violent Lebanese monsters."
"Yes."

Newspaper Headline: Victims are Screaming, but No-one Hears, by Miranda Devine

Harry Potter: My name's Harry Potter. I'm a journalist/crime reporter/producer with Network Ten in Sydney. I'm at Darling Harbour in the heart of Sydney at the moment, and we're about to join the police commissioner on a walk through Chinatown because they're very concerned about the gangs that demand money in extortion from the ... (fade)

Talkback radio: "... the public have responded magnificently to this sentence, haven't they? The public has said "enough is enough ..."

Radio Eye: We're living in the age of retribution ...

Talkback radio: "... loaded very heavily against the criminal, and favourably for the public ..."

Radio Eye: An age where notions of rehabilitation are largely dead.

Talkback radio: "I have found someone who's worried about the sentence for this vermin ..."

Radio Eye: If we're going to find "Laura", we have to look at a fundamental political shift in the last 30 years.

Talkback radio: "... society is saying there are people who should rot in jail. Guess what, professor? You're right! We are saying that ..."

News report: "This is a city where police have warned women not to walk too close to the kerb for fear of being pulled into a car and gang-raped, and exhorted parents to lock all their doors and windows in case a burglar comes in and breaks their children's skulls."

Talkback radio: Caller: "I'm sick in the stomach to think what the world, or Australia, is going to be like."
Announcer: "Well, the tide might have turned."
Caller: "Oh, I hope so."
Announcer: "Good on you. Have a good weekend."

Chris Cuneen: The role of victim has received a new place, if you like, in terms of thinking about what's appropriate in the way the criminal justice system should operate. Victims' and offenders' rights have been polarised in political arguments and now, you know, if you raise the rights of offenders, you are seen to be attacking the rights of victims, and so now there's been this political connection between the notion that any support for an offender means an automatic lack of support for the victim, as if it's a zero-sum game, where you can only support either victims or offenders.

Talkback radio: "What is going on in this town? I don't know, we ..."

Guy (ex-burglar): Generally, it's innocent people who get hit because you don't know them. Driving along, you see a house, you might even do what people call a "sneak go", where somebody's at home.

Well, my name's Guy, and I started using heroin at sixteen and it led to jail ... and more jail. You sneak around the house while someone's there. You come in, you find a woman's handbag or something like that and, without any thought of their possessions, you know, "who gives a shit?" - you just want to make sure there's some money there and if there isn't, you'll be annoyed, say "what the fuck is wrong with these people? Poverty stricken pricks, walk around with no money."

Harry Potter: Answering telephone: "Harry Potter. Hello ... excuse me a minute."
Yes. While we're waiting here, as you know, I've just taken a call in connection with a high profile prisoner who's been knifed in Lithgow jail, which is in the state's west, beyond the Blue Mountains, and [there's] a lot of police activity there. We're not sure who it is but a number of high profile court cases have been wound-up recently and we've got to make sure it's no-one who's maybe worth a story.

"Crime among the young: the five jails in New South Wales are full for the first time in ten years because of a marked increase in the number of criminals in the 18-25 age group. Jail inmates in the state yesterday totalled 2,014, figures reminiscent of the worst depression years. Money goes on luxuries and drink. Some people become avaricious and others irresponsible."
Sydney Morning Herald, 21st March, 1944

Radio Eye: While there's nothing new about crime waves, our increasing reliance on prison as the favoured punishment has evolved over the last quarter of a century.

Chris Cuneen: At a broad level, I think, what we're seeing is the ascendancy of what's been referred to as neo-liberal governments, neo-liberal regimes, and that cuts across differences between labour and conservatives and social-democrats. The basics of the neo-liberal position in relation to crime and punishment seems to permeate all the major political parties.

Radio Eye: Associate Professor Chris Cuneen is the Director of the Institute of Criminology at Sydney University.

Nick Franklin: "I first saw "Laura Norder" as a piece of graffiti on a wall in Sydney in the early seventies. 'Bob Askin loves Laura Norder.'"

Crooner: "Laura is the face in the misty light ..."

Radio Eye: Bob Askin was the Liberal premier of the day. The fact that he loved "Laura Norder" was in keeping with being a Conservative, but, in those days, it wasn't part of the Labor line.

Bruce Hawker: The very term "Law and Order" is something that was not in general vogue twenty years ago. It was a term which, people thought, was imported largely from South Africa, and it had all those sort of connotations.

Radio Eye: South Africa because …?

Bruce Hawker: There was a Law and Order ministry there. Queensland was always strong on law and order, so it had an emotional, almost ideological context in which it was expressed.

Radio Eye: Bruce Hawker was a political adviser in the New South Wales Labor governments of the late 70s and early 80s; a government that did something that's politically unthinkable today. It did its best to keep people out of jail by changing laws, especially those that had been applied with often racist overtones, like the Summary Offences Act. And there was something else which would be unthinkable today: the jail system itself became an issue. The Nagle Royal Commission exposed a regime in which the authorities had institutionalised brutality. Inmates were routinely bashed by prison authorities. Labor's liberalisation of the law, and reform of the prison system, fell apart when it appointed Rex "Buckets" Jackson as Minister to oversee the jails. "Buckets" ran a unique early-release program. Prisoners could gain freedom by simply making a personal payment to the Minister.

Bruce Hawker: And, of course, what happened then, in part as a response to that but also as part of a concerted campaign by people who thought that the governments of the day were going too "soft" on crime, was a campaign initiated by the opposition of the day. When they were elected in 1988, they introduced a so-called "truth in sentencing" legislation, which basically did what it claimed to do, and that was give a clear indication of what the sentence was going to be, how long you were going to serve when the judge brought down that sentence. That led to an immediate increase in the prison population. According to Bureau of Crime stats, it went up by 36 percent in three years.

Crooner: "That was Laura, but she's only a dream."

Prison loud hailer: "Attention. Jones, to the office. Smith, to the ... "

Chris Cuneen: The prison system itself is more about warehousing, keeping people off the street, incapacitating people, rather than relying on processes of rehabilitation and, when people are released from prison, the concentration then is on monitoring them in terms of their likelihood of re-offending. So, if this is the thought-pattern that is underpinning all of this, it's a shift from a focus on rehabilitation, to risk-assessment.

Harry Potter: Answering telephone: "Hello. Harry Potter. Have you any feedback from Lithgow? I think it's a warder who's been stabbed, not a prisoner. Is that right?"

Bob Carr, Premier of New South Wales: These changes will increase the prison population. The Department of Corrective Services is making provision for an increase of about eight hundred in the next two years. That's an increase of about fifty percent in the remand population. This is expensive.

Radio montage: "... vote-winning issues like Law and Order."
"... strong law and order ..."
"... Law and Disorder ..."

Bruce Hawker: I think law and order campaigns have been pretty much at the centre of people's thinking for a long time now. Certainly, in the 1970s and 1980s in New South Wales, there was a movement away from law and order as an issue. Labor governments, under Wran particularly, went about trying to get the public's support for a range of initiatives which people today would say were probably politically correct but also had various important social implications.

Radio Eye: After his early days working in the Wran Labor government in New South Wales, Bruce Hawker went on to become Bob Carr's Chief of Staff, both in opposition and as Premier. He now runs his own consultancy and advised Labor in the last six state and federal elections. These days, he says, every election is a law and order election.

Bruce Hawker: What we do is look at what the public's thinking about these issues, and then it's up to the politicians to decide how far they're going to go. But certainly, we've found an increasing concern among members of the public about security; through the polling, focus groups, just through the process of discussing these issues with the public. Being involved in a campaign has been something of a barometer: we find that those are concerns that people have constantly, so in a political campaign it's very hard to shy away from being actively involved in a law and order debate.

Radio montage political ads:
"Is our visible criminal policy too humiliating for a teenage vandal? Maybe, but it'll work ..."
"... public humiliation aspects ..."
"We are all safer. Tough decisions have paid off."
"You promised to take a tough stand on crime, so how do you explain a thirty-five percent increase in assault rates?"
"My government has made the tough decisions on law enforcement against Liberal Party opposition in parliament. We voted to turn up three Royal Commissions ..."
"... tough decisions, tough stand ..."
"... tough, tough, tough ..."

Guy: I didn't steal because I liked it, I stole because I wanted drugs. So most of the time I'd be hanging out, drying out, sick because I hadn't had any heroin. When you're in a situation where you're hanging out, you don't give a shit when a window's getting broken and you're pulling drawers and throwing clothes and shit, just looking for things. You don't give a fuck about anybody's, you know, privacy. I know how I'd feel if I came home and my house had been torn to pieces and all my shit was everywhere, and I'd think "Well, why did they go to so much trouble to fuck everything up? All they had to do was take it. Why'd they mess everything up, too?" And I think back now on things I've done and I think "Jesus, what a prick. if there is such a thing as karma, have I got some coming."

"We feel that we're in circumstances of imminent danger to our property and danger to our very lives. Robberies and murders, increasing both in numbers and in audacity, infest our streets. Anxieties and alarm have seized our families and, in many instances, have almost banished sleep from their eyes. Something must be done: done effectually and done forthwith."
Sydney Morning Herald, 8th June, 1844

Chris Cuneen: That's what the foundation of White Australia was built on: isolating and identifying marginalised groups and transporting them around the world. So the criminal justice system hasn't changed, I think, in that respect and, if you look back, historically, at the development of police and the development of prison, it's always been the same types of communities if not the same communities, that are most heavily policed and whose members end up incarcerated. I don't see any change in that. I mean, racialisation of the criminal justice system is an important issue today, and there's both continuity and change there. There's continuity in the sense that Aboriginal peoples have always been a racialised group that have borne the brunt of policing and the criminal justice system. Other groups have become racialised around crime: we've seen it with middle-eastern people and Vietnamese people. You know, if you look back thirty years ago we might replace those categories with Italians and Greeks.

Bruce Hawker: We banish people to psychiatric hospitals, certainly after the first World War in great numbers because there were a lot of people who came back with terrible psychiatric conditions. The response was to put them into homes, "out of sight, out of mind". We did it with young women who were unmarried, expectant mothers; they were banished to homes to have their babies, only to reappear later on without the child. We certainly did it in great numbers to children who were deemed to be exposed to moral danger or threats to themselves in one way or another, and our history is one of putting kids in institutions for truanting, for heaven's sake, and that's only a recent phenomenon: that we were doing that with kids for truanting. So, "banishment" is very much part-and-parcel of Australian social history.

Harry Potter: Answering telephone: "Hello. Harry Potter. I'm fine, pal. Look, mate, I'm just trying to check on the Lithgow incident. Prisoner or warder? 45 year-old prisoner, stabbed five times ... wow."

Radio Eye: This is Radio Eye on Radio National, and we're "looking for Laura".

Harry Potter: Answering telephone still: "Is he high profile or not, mate? thank you very much, mate. Thanks, pal."
Hmm. Not a bad story.

Promotional housing-estate pamplet: "Not far away lies a better life. A place that's really close to the city, yet far from the maddening crowd. An estate that surrounds an international golf-course, set amongst green trees and rolling plains, and it's just off the ..."

Peter Icklow: It's a masterplanned estate which approaches through these open gates. The gates are open because we don't want to give the impression of total security, but it is. We call it "concierge security" and Greg's on duty at the moment. It's 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and he can just greet everyone coming and going and he's watching what goes on, as you just saw then. There's also a camera up there which is going to record my number plate as I arrive. There's also one as I leave. My name's Peter Icklow, I'm the Managing Director of the Monarch Investments Group of Companies. Coming in the entry boulevard at the moment, the golf-course is on the right. On the left here, we've got the community's swimming pool and tennis courts (there are two championship tennis courts). All the roads are privately owned, the parks are privately owned, and that's why everything is maintained so well, and that's why we're able to have the security concierge. And the private road actually starts at the gate and we are actually able to stop people from coming in if we want to.

Return to housing-estate pamplet: "It's not just the physical security of knowing that unwanted elements are kept out, especially during the long days at work or while you're all away for the weekend, there's also the emotional security, of coming through the entrance to the estate and being welcomed by the friendly, reassuring face of your security concierge."

Peter Icklow: Michael Shiner was one of our very early residents in here. He bought one of our Monarch design houses opposite the golf-course. He's lived here now probably for about 18 months, I'd say.

Michael Shiner: I grew up in the area and, I guess, as soon as I saw the signs go up I knew .. you know, from a kid, just running through here when it was pastureland and nothing there, that it was a magnificent piece of land and it would be a fairly prestigious address, certainly something to aspire to, and I wanted to stay in the area.

Radio Eye: How much were the security features an aspect to you?

Michael Shiner: I think that it was important from the point of view that you would be able to maintain the integrity of the estate. It was important but it wasn't the overriding factor. I think that what it gives us is at least the perception that it's safe. The other thing is that we have an environment here where [there are] magnificent gardens and park areas, and they're well maintained and manicured, and that you know, to an extent at least, we're going to be able to keep them as they are. So you don't have graffiti, you don't have all that stuff that you see in normal communities, that is in your face all the time and that is confronting. We don't have that problem.

Radio Eye: Five minutes away from Macquarie Links is the other suburb called Macquarie: Macquarie Fields, old housing commission, where Michael Shiner grew up along with the local MP, Mark Latham.

Mark Latham: I've lived in the south-west of Sydney all my life. I think there's a feeling of insecurity when you hear of others having had their home broken into, or your own; street crime, bag-snatching, and a feeling that, perhaps, young people aren't as decent as they used to be, when you see, or rather hear, the loud music, the loud cars, and people hooning around the streets. It's a minority of young people that engage in that sort of behaviour. There's a feeling that the normal standards of public decency are breaking down. You know, it weakens confidence about the security of your home, security of your family, security of your property. So I think that general decline in public decency is probably the thing that upsets people most.

Radio:
"It's a bit of a law and order morning in Sydney this morning and, indeed, Commissioner Ken Moroney's found the fugitive and he's getting him to talk. Mr. Moroney is in talks with the Police Minister, Michael Costa, as we speak. Opposition Leader John Brogden and police spokesman Andrew Tink, are making a ..."

Mark Latham: Very often, I think, in these surveys, law and order, while there are crime issues that government needs to address, that society needs to address, I think law and order, as a short-hand description gets swept up in this general feeling of social breakdown: that we're not as secure and confident in our relationships with other people as we might have been twenty or thirty years ago.

Michael Shiner: Talking, certainly, to my parents, for example, and plenty of people like that, the pace of change in Sydney, and particularly, I guess, now we have the advent of more ethnically based crimes, is very concerning, particularly to older people. And I know that might not be an accepted thing to say, but I think the reality of it is 40 percent of all immigrants that come to Australia will end up settling in Sydney, and most of those will settle in the south-western suburbs of Sydney. It's hard not to talk about those without in some way being accused of being racist, but I think the bottom line is, if there are problems, then the people confronted with those on a daily basis are the people living in south-western Sydney.

Talkback Radio: "It's five minutes to nine. When we took the open line calls early this morning, all you wanted to talk about was this bully and the coward .."

Mark Latham: In the United States. It's known as "white flight". That's just the short-hand description for the movement of a dynamic city, but basically, what I think you're getting are people who've lived all their lives in areas like Bankstown, Fairfield, deciding to retire on the urban fringe, perhaps greater peace of mind, in one of these new housing estates, and people raising young families who are trading up. Those young families are also moving to the urban fringe because there's a stronger perception of security and stability. "White flight" is just the short-hand description of what is a practical reality."

Radio montage: "It's a crime of degradation and contempt."
"I have found someone who's worried about ..."
"... vermin ..."
"... violent armed robbery ..."
"... what on earth is going on ..?"
"... three of the victims ..."

Radio Eye:
In the age of insecurity, the concept of security has, itself, become a product.

Bill Randolph: What these sorts of suburbs are saying is that this space is private, and its internalising all those fears about what's going on out in the public realm, the public domain. I think that the notion within "white flight" is a racial component. I suspect a lot of people moving to the fringe are second-generation migrants themselves, the sons and daughters of immigrants. So I think the racial connotation there should not be taken too seriously. I think it's more about affluence and ability to move, rather than anything else.

Radio Eye: Professor Bill Randolph runs the Urban Frontiers project at the University of Western Sydney. With colleague Brendan Gleeson, he has studied how the retreat from public to private is changing the way we live now. Welcome to the world of "privatopias".

Brendan Gleeson: "Privatopias" is a term, I think, that's been coined somewhat derisively in the United States, to describe these "ideal" security communities, some of them based upon home owner associations which people buy into [in] these communities, and they are part of a community title framework. That maintains, on behalf of the community, public (well, they're not really public facilities, but community) facilities and spaces, and there's a whole industry, in a sense a dream industry, in the United States, that weaves dreams around living in perfect masterplanned communities, of which security is an important dimension. But there could be all sorts of other things like, even, the Disney Corporation has crafted some of these communities. And they're about re-capturing, for people, a yearning-for and a sense-of, community, solidarity, a pleasantly designed neighbourhood, high amenity.

Promotional pamplet: "At last, here's the lifestyle you've been looking for ..."

Harry Potter: Telephone conversation: "G'day, mate. How're you doing? Look, Lithgow's not a bad yarn. 45 year old prisoner doing twenty years for armed rob., sexual offences, assault, etc. Mate, the position is [at] 8.45 this morning he's been set upon by three other crims ..."

Guy: I pick up a piece of jewellery, and this could be a piece of jewellery that somebody's given to her, maybe the kid's given it to her. It's not even real, it's gold-plated. Fucking tight-arse. That would piss me off, and where do I get off, being pissed off? Because the jewellery isn't good enough. It's not up to my standards, for Christ's sake, you know? You know, how'd I feel if I came home and all my things had been gone through and all my private things'd been gone through? I'd be shattered, I'd be so upset. But I'd know the person who did it was probably exactly the way I was back then, and he didn't give a shit. All he wanted was money for drugs."

"Hooliganism and vandalism have reached epidemic proportions in this city. The government, to its credit, is doing its best to remedy this, but what is more disturbing than this is the seeming social decline, the deterioration in moral outlook which makes more police necessary. Gangs of young hoodlums and would-be tough guys, oddly arrayed and hunting in packs, terrorise shopkeepers, attack innocent strangers in the streets, just for kicks, apparently, and do untold stupid damage in trains, buses, and anywhere else they think that can get away with it."
Sydney Morning Herald, 2nd January, 1967

Don Weatherburn: Well, when people say there's a crime wave or crime's out of control, I often think they're talking poetry rather than fact.

Radio Eye: Don Weatherburn is Director of the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.

Don Weatherburn: The fact of the matter is that, over the last twenty-five years, there have been some substantial increases in the major categories of crime, not just in New South Wales, but across Australia as a whole. And the crimes I'm talking about are break/enter and steal, motor vehicle theft, robbery, assault to some extent. Most of those increases occurred during the 1980s, they continued in the 90s but not at such an extreme level. That's the broad brush picture.

Radio Eye: House burglaries have become the classic high-rise crime of our age. Most homes have something worth stealing: TVs, videos, mobiles.

Guy: Ninety percent get away. I think I heard that somewhere. If you get caught for a break and enter, you're one of the ten percent. It could even be less, I'm not sure, but it was phenomenal. It was, like, "wow. Is it that easy to get away with?" I didn't realise that's how few they catch for them.

Radio Eye: Law and order has always thrived on statistics, although her figures can sometimes be confusing. Yes, crime has increased, but not all crime. Take the most feared crime of all.

Don Weatherburn: If you're talking about homicide, there hasn't been a significant increase for about twenty years in homicide, perhaps longer.

Radio Eye: That's murder?

Don Weatherburn: That's murder. But, although there's been a substantial increase in, for example, gun crimes, shooting incidents, the numbers are still pretty small and most of it has occurred in four suburbs in south-western Sydney.

Radio Eye: Not surprisingly, it's the crimes that are most visible that get noticed. Graffiti tagging, burglaries. Whereas corporate crime often remains invisible until it's too late. Even the line between legality and illegality is often blurred: criminals in the high-rollers room laundering their money in a legal casino.

Don Weatherburn: White collar crime, corruption, drug trafficking, crimes that are generally discovered rather than reported, we don't measure at all well. We cannot say, for example, whether the level of white collar crime has gone up, we cannot say whether the level of corruption has gone up. People can guess, but the truth of the matter is, since these crimes are so rarely reported and only ever discovered, the statistics tend to go up when we put more energy into looking for them, and down when we reduce the level of energy put into looking for them.

Radio Eye: Laura Norder seems far more comfortable with violent crime than white collar crime. Whether it's fact or fiction, she's everywhere, dominating commercial TV news bulletins and prime time viewing. In many ways, what we fear in fact we can't get enough of in fiction, and what we enjoy in fiction we can't get enough of in fact.

Katy Hall: Something like forty percent of TV news is taken up with crime stories. Research has been done which indicates a similar kind of preoccupation in America, so I think there's a real fascination there because it's got so much inherent drama in it. Police see people at their most vulnerable and they also see people at those moments in their lives where there is great crisis and struggle. The story almost has epic proportions to it and mythical proportions to it.

Radio Eye: Katy Hall is a crime historian.

TV News (Harry Potter reporting):
"Ambush over, the State Protection Group packs up its fire power as the Strike Force moves in. Already, three young men at this Prospect home have been caught, cuffed, and caged in the police truck."

Harry Potter: I think it's a glamour round. We have a lot of work experience - young people, uni students, and others come in to work in the news room and I am pleased to say that a lot of them make a bee-line for me because they know what I do is going to be fun, or they're going to do something different, they might get to fly in a helicopter. It's never dull.

TV News (Harry Potter reporting): "They door-knocked the area. telling residents they needed help getting drugs off the street, and that made this mother of seven's day."
"I think it's great that they're making the streets safe again for my children to be able to walk their bike or whatever they need to do."

TV: "Tonight on The Bill: 'We want you to come home, Jack. Is scotch your only vice, Jack?'
'You ruined his marriage and his career! You destroyed his life.' British TV ..."

Katy Hall: You begin with a crime. You begin with a scene of disorder and, by the end of the story, that order is again restored and there must be comfort in that, I believe, for a lot of people. Sitting in your loungeroom at night, cosy and comfortable in your own home, you can see danger being played out, outside of your sphere of reality. Then, at the end of that drama, order is again restored. It's very interesting, the way that police drama will obscure certain aspects of policing that may be discomforting to the public. A lot of people don't have contact with police on a daily basis in their lives; they go about their lives and they're generally fairly law-abiding, then, perhaps, they get an issue with the odd traffic infringement, but that might be their only interaction with police, so a lot of people have a fairly skewed vision, I think, of what police actually do. When I did some teaching at the Goulburn Police Academy, I found it very interesting to talk to young recruits about what their reasons were for joining the police force, and often they had a very mythologised image of policing.

The Bill: "... so give me something I can use."
"You will receive a call. Any moment now. There is a gang doing robberies around the M25."
"And ..?"
"And they have just done another robbery."
"And ..?"
"And Paul Kerrigan will give them to you, Jack."

Katy Hall: Some of the literature about policing in the U.K. talks about the notion of consent and how, in order for the police to police effectively, there needs to be a level of consent ; ie. a level of the community accepting them as an authority. So, I think a show like The Bill still does maintain a view of policing as being policing almost as social work, where the police are very rarely seen to intervene in people's lives in an aggressive way. They're constantly portrayed as being very supportive of people and understanding of people; whereas in fact, the reality of law enforcement is that it is often not capable of being that because of its very nature.

Dramatised extract: "The inspector's got to be happy with that."
"I'm sorry. What are we talking about?"
"Last month's crime stats."
"Oh, yes. Were they up or down?"

Bruce Hawker: I think people actually disengage a little bit, as a rule, from the cop shows and think that it's just a piece of fantasy, but, I think, when they're confronted by the reality of a crime scene (a shooting, a stabbing, a murder), that strikes home very deeply. And I think that's the difference between the two: one's real, one's fantasy.

TV News report (Harry Potter reporting): "The run-down home had been under police surveillance for weeks, and the heavily armed State Protection Group met with little resistance, having the vital element of surprise on its side as the assault team went in."

Radio Eye: Fact, fiction, and fear, are all part of the strange personality that is Laura Norder. Schizophrenia is a word used by a New South Wales Liberal MP to describe his own political colleagues' attitude to law and order. His use of "schizophrenia" is inaccurate as a medical definition, but his audience at a criminal justice conference in Sydney knew exactly what he was talking about. John Ryan is head of the Select Committee into the increase in the New South Wales prison population.

John Ryan: Knowing the fact that I represent the Liberal Party of New South Wales, you'll probably say "Gee, your party seems to be somewhat schizophrenic on the issue of the criminal justice system". I think the entire political system is somewhat schizophrenic on this issue. I don't think that's something that's entirely particular to my own political party. I suppose, now that we have a new leader of the opposition, I can tell you the rather humorous anecdote of the day in which I released this report, and, as it happened, I was going downstairs as my leader, Ms. Chickarovski was on her way out of the room; to which she looked at me and she said "I believe you're going to introduce some bloody report that's going to let everybody out of prison. Get upstairs to my office. I want to talk to you before you say anything about this." I'd never had such an extraordinary exchange with one of my colleagues in my life. Anyway, being the reasonably cooperative person I was, I duly attempted to go upstairs because she was on her way to question time (thank heavens, because I knew that would take her out of the game for at least forty-five minutes), and one of her press secretaries came down to talk to me, looked at the report and said "Oh, that's all right. Just go ahead. That's no particular problem." So I duly did, and then escaped the building immediately afterwards. (general laughter)

Talkback radio: "He spent his time in court mouthing obscenities and, smirking, told the judge "I'm innocent, and I'll remain innocence (which the word was wrong) till the day I die, you c..." he called him. He deserves forty years just for that, doesn't he? Tell me what you think."

Radio Eye: Laura Norder talks dirty. Her language is slippery and elusive. She can crop up anywhere: from fears about burglars in the suburbs, to a determination to "lay down the law" about who can cross our international boundaries.

John Howard: "We will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come." (applause)

TV Reporter: "The applause was nearly as long for his Immigration Minister."

Bruce Hawker: What I thought was particularly clever was the way in which Howard stood at the lectern and made the declaration in clear, unequivocal terms, "We will decide who it is that comes into our country." That was a simple statement in a bite-sized chunk that everybody could understand. And I'm convinced that, in every household around the country there would have been somebody nodding in agreement with that notion. So, that is why I thought that was such an effective piece of propaganda, and it was obviously in response to things that had gone before it; it was in response to Tampa, it was in response to September 11, it was in response to the more conservative, security-minded state that not only Australia was in, but the entire world was part of. and John Howard was very much able to place himself at the centre of all that, having been in Washington on September 11.

Chris Cuneen: Writers like Bowman talk about the impact of globalisation and the profound individual insecurity that's come with globalisation, and that insecurity itself has become translated into fears around crime, fears around disorder, and demands being placed on the state to actually deal with those issues. And he would go on to argue that, in the period of globalised economic relations, there are very few areas, in fact, where the nation-state does have any power any more, in terms of global economic relations, but it does have power over its domestic policies in relation to law and order. So, the state itself can appear to be strong.

Bruce Hawker: It's very hard to isolate anything and say that is the essence of why there are more people in jail now than there were before, but it makes it easier to conduct law and order-style campaigns when that is the over-arching sense that the nation has, or state has. It's a very brave person, these days, who comes out and runs civil libertarian lines. Once upon a time, twenty years ago, being part of the civil liberties movement was very mainstream and you were taken very seriously. Now, to be a civil libertarian, you're almost a kook.

Andrew George: There is a belief that prison is an answer to offending behaviour.

Radio Eye: Andrew George is a magistrate at Manly.

Andrew George: But it needs to be remembered that ninety-five percent of all criminal prosecutions are dealt with in a magistrate's court. The maximum jurisdiction of a magistrate is, really, effectively, two years and, sending somebody to prison for two years is not likely to deal, forever, with whatever kind of problem they are creating in the community, whether it is by virtue of mental illness or otherwise. I mean, I like to believe there are people who are more sensitive and sensible than to assume that casting somebody into the prison system is going to really solve that person's problem and rehabilitate them. Prison does not rehabilitate anybody, and the ninety-five percent of people who are dealt with in magistrate's courts, they are all going to come out of prison at some point.

Guy: Well, after the first time, I swore I'd never go back. I was in four times, really. It's like if you've got this dog, lives on the corner house and, every time you go to pat it, it bites you. You're not going to go pat that dog, but with heroin, it's sort of funny. Even though you know heroin is like that dog - it's going to bite you, it's going to fuck you up every time - you still go back and pat it. I don't know why it does it but it just does.

Dramatised extract: "I got a phone call from the Commissioner, and then one from the Minister. It doesn't look good when it's one of ours. When we cop it, the public gets nervous and then it gets political"

Politician: How safe we feel in our beds at night, whether parents worry their children will be mugged or gang-raped every time they're out of sight, whether our houses continue to be robbed at record levels, will determine the outcome of the state election next year.

Radio Eye: Looking for Laura featured Harry Potter, Chief Crime Reporter for the Channel Ten Network, Sydney; Bruce Hawker, Managing Director of Hawker Britton Consultants; Peter Icklow, Managing Director of monarch Investments; Michael Shiner, resident of Macquarie Links, one of Australia's newest private suburbs; Chris Cuneen, Director of the Institute of Criminology at Sydney University; Brendan Gleeson and Professor Bill Randolph, who run the Urban Frontiers project at the University of Western Sydney; Don Weatherburn, Director of the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research; Mark Latham, Federal Member for Campbelltown and recently appointed as Labor's national spokesman on crime; John Ryan, head of the Select Committee in to the increase in the prison population in New South Wales; Katy Hall, crime historian; Guy, the ex-burglar; and Andrew George, a magistrate at Manly. Sound engineering by Stephen Tilly. Narration and production by Sharon Davis and Nick Franklin.

Back to top

Radio National Links:
The Law Report on Radio National
Do governments' draconian law and order policies have any effect on reducing crime rates? - Radio National's Australia Talks Back
Law and Order on Australia Talks Back
Professor David Brown from the University of NSW discusses law and order electioneering on Radio National's Perspective
Also on Perspective:
Bail Laws and Prison Remand
Identity Theft
Innocent and In Gaol
Police Unions in Australia

Other Related Links:
Government of New South Wales Select Committee on the Increase in Prisoner Population Final (pdf)
Urban Frontiers (Privatopias)

Schedule   Tune In   Contact Us   About

© 2002 ABC | Privacy Policy