Page 3257 - Week 11 - Thursday, 13 September 1990
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of $48m on police. That went to $52m when the contract was announced. I see in the budget that we are now talking of $54,680,000 being spent on police. I take you now to a question I asked on 7 August and the answer by the Chief Minister. He was talking about the police from a treasury perspective. He said:
We will make the same decisions about the police force and over a transition period we will bring the expenditure on the police force back to a reasonable figure, just as we are doing in education and health.
This should be of great concern to the community. If we go back to the Grants Commission's third report of 1988, where they talked about police expenditure at the time, we find that the per capita expenditure on policing in 1986 was $99. In 1988 it was $126. If you use the figure of $54m and divide that by the number of people in Canberra currently, the result you get shows a per capita expenditure of about $192. The first increase that is mentioned in the Grants Commission is 28 per cent and I will read from that Grants Commission report. It says:
The ACT actual expenditure figure used in the 1988 assessment was $126.66 per capita ... an increase of about 28 per cent between 1985-86 ... and 1986-87.
For the States of New South Wales and Victoria the average increase for the same period was about 13 per cent. The average increase for all States was 8 per cent. At that stage of course we are talking about a 28 per cent increase in police spending for the ACT. The report states:
As the data were determined for the ACT Administration from outside the ACT Fiscus, the ACT did not have the same degree of control over expenditure decisions or expenditure allocations.
The Grants Commission recognised that. It continued:
The available data did not indicate why expenditure increased so markedly. The Commission invites the attention of the ACT Administration and the Australian Federal Police to this problem.
So the 28 per cent increase they were talking about then was considered to be a major problem which the Grants Commission drew attention to - and that was only a minimal 28 per cent increase, not the 53 per cent increase we have had over the next period. The Grants Commission went on in paragraph 5.42 to say:
Although there were some data problems, the ... ACT police staffing levels appeared to be higher than standard levels. The ratio of ACT police to population was clearly above standard, but there
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