Page 2400 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 7 August 1990
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but it is not a target of $6m as you suggest. I repeat, there was no financial target set for the Education Department.
Now we come to the police, and you insinuate that somehow or other this Government is conniving in overexpenditure on police services. What we have just done is signed an agreement with the Commonwealth that the ACT Police, or the ACT division of the police, will transfer to our responsibility, and the Commonwealth will transfer with it the amount of money that it would have spent this year if it had continued to manage it. We have not set the figure. We have taken the figure put on it by the Commonwealth and it said in round figures that if we had continued to run the ACT division of the Police Force in 1990-91 it would have cost us about $48m. That is the amount that it has transferred. There is no continuing commitment beyond this year for us to spend that amount of money, or more or less, on the ACT division.
We will be reviewing it during this fiscal year, the first year in which the police are under our control, and before this time next year we will be making a determination about what the annual budget of the ACT Police Force ought to be. That is responsible management. We cannot second guess the Commonwealth. We do not know what it cost it to run the ACT division of the Police Force last year. We have to take the Commonwealth's figures and work from there. This is what we have done. I believe this is responsible. It says nothing about the financial management capability of this Government. That will be reflected in next year's budget which this Government will again bring down, despite the wishes of the Stalinist rabble opposite. This Government will bring down the budget next year and after the election in February 1992 this Government will bring down a series of three more budgets and you will have five years at the end of which you can make a judgment about whether this Government is financially competent or not.
MR MOORE: My supplementary question is directed at the leader of the gestapo over there and - - -
MR ACTING SPEAKER: Mr Moore, I would ask you to withdraw that.
MR MOORE: I withdraw that, Mr Acting Speaker. I just remind you, Mr Acting Speaker, that you did not ask him to withdraw the Stalinist comment before, and I would have thought that Stalin and Hitler were on a par.
It is fair to say then, Chief Minister, that you are prepared to cut the police budget over the next year from roughly $48m, the figure you just gave, to what the Grants Commission gives as its figure, which is $26.858m, on page 56?
MR KAINE: No; it is not as simple and as black and white as that, Mr Moore, as you would understand.
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