Mr KIELY - 2003-02-25
Last year, the government established a Crime Prevention NT Grants Scheme to provide funding to community projects. How is that grant funding being applied, and can you tell me the status of the latest round of applications for community grants?
ANSWER
Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Sanderson for a very important question. If you want to ask the question: ‘What is our government doing in real terms with real resources to back our communities in their attempts to help us lower crime?’, here is your answer - $400 000 a year as a crime prevention grants program. That grants program is being rolled out, as we speak, by the Office of Crime Prevention through increasing numbers of regional crime prevention councils.
The $400 000 is divided into three areas. $180 000 is for targeted grant programs. These are grants that can be sustained over several years, if necessary, and they are to take on programs that we believe are particularly important to be brought into a more recurrent picture. An example of that is Real Justice Northern Territory, which is being trialled in Alice Springs, Tennant Creek, Palmerston and Sanderson High Schools. This is a restorative justice program aimed at kerbing antisocial behaviour of students and other problems that are occurring within those schools. It is an excellent program, and I look forward later on to see the results of the evaluation of that program. However, the early indications are that issues that have come up have been very well resolved within that program.
Some $100 000 of the grant fund is being used to underwrite the establishment and the early operation of some of the regional crime prevention councils. We have been able to provide some establishment grants to support Alice Springs, Tennant Creek, Katherine and, out bush, the Kurduju Committee. We look forward to seeing further regional crime prevention councils established, not the least being in Darwin itself. Last week, I was able to indicate to members that the Neighbourhood Watch committee has agreed to form the basis of the Darwin regional crime prevention council. That is a very major step forward in turning the initiatives that have been coming out under things like the itinerant strategies and the Night Patrols into evaluated, repeatable crime prevention initiatives to the benefit of each of the centres in which one of these councils is going to operate.
The final component of the grants scheme is $120 000 to fund small crime prevention grants throughout the Territory of up to $15 000. The first round of this scheme closed on 20 January this year, and we were absolutely delighted with the response we got from community groups all over the Territory – people from remote communities through to the major urban centres. Fifty-two applications which totalled over $1.3m were received. We will now be assessing them through the Crime Prevention Committee of CEOs in mid-March, and will be congratulating a number of organisations that are successful in that grant scheme.
We want to see advice from our regional crime prevention councils. We want to be able to work, through the Office of Crime Prevention on that advice, to pass crime prevention initiatives throughout the government system. We are not seeing the Office of Crime Prevention as the only part of government that works on crime prevention. For us, it is a whole-of-government commitment and there will be whole-of-government initiatives located in all of our agencies that are contributing to the overall effort that we are making to reduce crime in the Northern Territory, and make for safer communities for Territorians to live in.
ANSWER
Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Sanderson for a very important question. If you want to ask the question: ‘What is our government doing in real terms with real resources to back our communities in their attempts to help us lower crime?’, here is your answer - $400 000 a year as a crime prevention grants program. That grants program is being rolled out, as we speak, by the Office of Crime Prevention through increasing numbers of regional crime prevention councils.
The $400 000 is divided into three areas. $180 000 is for targeted grant programs. These are grants that can be sustained over several years, if necessary, and they are to take on programs that we believe are particularly important to be brought into a more recurrent picture. An example of that is Real Justice Northern Territory, which is being trialled in Alice Springs, Tennant Creek, Palmerston and Sanderson High Schools. This is a restorative justice program aimed at kerbing antisocial behaviour of students and other problems that are occurring within those schools. It is an excellent program, and I look forward later on to see the results of the evaluation of that program. However, the early indications are that issues that have come up have been very well resolved within that program.
Some $100 000 of the grant fund is being used to underwrite the establishment and the early operation of some of the regional crime prevention councils. We have been able to provide some establishment grants to support Alice Springs, Tennant Creek, Katherine and, out bush, the Kurduju Committee. We look forward to seeing further regional crime prevention councils established, not the least being in Darwin itself. Last week, I was able to indicate to members that the Neighbourhood Watch committee has agreed to form the basis of the Darwin regional crime prevention council. That is a very major step forward in turning the initiatives that have been coming out under things like the itinerant strategies and the Night Patrols into evaluated, repeatable crime prevention initiatives to the benefit of each of the centres in which one of these councils is going to operate.
The final component of the grants scheme is $120 000 to fund small crime prevention grants throughout the Territory of up to $15 000. The first round of this scheme closed on 20 January this year, and we were absolutely delighted with the response we got from community groups all over the Territory – people from remote communities through to the major urban centres. Fifty-two applications which totalled over $1.3m were received. We will now be assessing them through the Crime Prevention Committee of CEOs in mid-March, and will be congratulating a number of organisations that are successful in that grant scheme.
We want to see advice from our regional crime prevention councils. We want to be able to work, through the Office of Crime Prevention on that advice, to pass crime prevention initiatives throughout the government system. We are not seeing the Office of Crime Prevention as the only part of government that works on crime prevention. For us, it is a whole-of-government commitment and there will be whole-of-government initiatives located in all of our agencies that are contributing to the overall effort that we are making to reduce crime in the Northern Territory, and make for safer communities for Territorians to live in.
Last updated: 09 Aug 2016