CHAPTER A 'New Police' in Australia In contrast to police in England, America or Canada, most police in Australia are characterised by their organisation on a State-wide jurisdiction.3 Like the Irish constabulary, which provided many of the early personnel and some of the organisational principles of police in Australia, the colonial police were, in general, administered from the capitals of the colonies. This important fact defined the conditions under which policing in Australia has operated only weakly as a community resource rather than a state imposition. What were the factors which produced in Australia a centralised, bureau- cratically organised police substantially autonomous of political control? The early developments were dominated by the colonial condition of settlement in Australia. Social conditions, anxieties about the new societies as well as the pre- vailing forms of government were all intimately involved. The inter-relation of these factors was played out differently in the various colonies. For most of the colonies, however, the crucial developments were at mid-century during the attainment of colonial self-government. As Table 1 indicates, to understand the colonial formation of Australian policing we must understand above all what occurred in the mid-nineteenth century. Table I Formation of the Australian colonial police State New South Wales 1862 Victoria 1853 Queensland 1863 South Australia 1844 Westem Australia 1861 Tasmania Year of centralisation 1898 Statute Police Act Police Act Police Act Police Act Police Ordinance Police Regulation Act 9
10 POLICE AND GOVERNMENT-PUBLIC HISTORIES THE IDEA OF THE POLICE Histories of police provide two quite different accounts of the formation of modern police. The first says that crime is a perennial problem, that it has been accelerated by the conditions of modern life, especially by industrialism and urbanisation and that police forces were created as a response to rising crime. In this view policing is essentially a good thing, and police forces represent the successful achievement by the modern state of a means of social control in the absence of the norms and social bonds of traditional community life. The second account suggests that modern police forces are marked by the conditions of their emergence in societies socially divided, above all by class. Police forces are not socially neutral instruments of a general social will for order, but are the creation of specific interests seeking to maintain their condi- tions of privilege in an unequal society. Hence, police inevitably function to protect the interests of the dominant class in society.4 In Australia, the former position was taken by the author of the first substan- tial work on police. In The Australian Police Forces, published in 1960, a Victorian police public relations officer, G. M. O'Brien, reviewed briefly the for- mation and subsequent history of each of the State police forces. For O'Brien, the 'police force is, in the democratic communities of the British Commonwealth, society's shield and safeguard, a bulwark against anarchy as he put it.5 More recently, the historian of the Victoria Police, Robert Haldane, has presented a view of that force which,