Dr. Des Hogan:

I echo the point colleagues are making. We state in our submission that no police station should be out of bounds for independent oversight and investigation. We do not in the future want to be faced with a situation where there are allegations of wrongdoing and no independent authority is able to investigate that alleged wrongdoing. In that scenario we would be back to commissions of investigations.

In other jurisdictions, national security is separate from policing for a particular reason and there are additional safeguards attached to independent oversight. I would not say that any state has a perfect system, but we are moving towards a more transparent society and an important aspect of the forthcoming review on the policing authority will be the question of how national security is captured. If it is not captured, we could be back here in a year or two discussing some other allegation about a particular police office in a particular part of the country that has been designated as being part of a national security defence, so to speak, for a GSOC or other investigation.