Narracan electorate police resources
Wayne FARNHAM (Narracan) (19:10): (1165) My adjournment this evening is to the Minister for Police, and the action I seek is that action be taken to deliver additional resources to the electorate of Narracan. I would like to take you to the most recent crime stats, which paint a very bleak picture for my community, particularly in the rapidly growing towns of Drouin and Warragul. The crime stats for Baw Baw rose 18.2 per cent, Drouin went up 14.5 per cent and Trafalgar 28.1 per cent. The problem with my area is that it is growing very, very quickly but unfortunately our police resources are stretched. The town of Warragul has a 24-hour police station. The police station in Drouin was built in 1974, when the population was only about 4000 people. Now the township of Drouin is nearly 20,000 people, and there are no additional services there. Trafalgar in the next couple of years will probably hit a population of about 7000 people. The flow-on effect of this is that with these communities growing it puts additional pressure on the Warragul police station to service these outlying areas.
There has been no significant investment in these townships. In fact the last investment was from the Baillieu government, which built a new police station in Trafalgar that had the ability to be expanded when the population grew, and that has not that has not been done yet. Back in 2018 the former member for Narracan committed to a new police station for Drouin, and rightly so. Drouin is one of those towns that just keeps growing and growing and growing.
Police resources are very, very stretched at the moment and our community is getting increasingly concerned, so I am asking the minister – I am urging the minister – to invest in this, to look at these two towns and at least get a 24-hour police station for Drouin and expand the Trafalgar police station so we can have more police up there as well.