Page 4030 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 24 October 1990
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MR COLLAERY: What I am trying to say is that never can we reach a concordat or a pact, on this floor or off this floor, with this Opposition. When I go around the country, as I do a lot, and talk to Ministers in all of the State governments - Labor, Liberal and so on - I see them come to our ministerial meetings saying, "I have discussed this with the Opposition. We have support on this, this and this". Quite frankly, none of us here know how to trust most of you in giving you confidential issues that require, at times, bipartisan support.
If there is one issue we need to talk about behind closed doors occasionally, it is how we battle the Commonwealth in this budget exercise. The Treasurer knows more about that than I do. Certainly, I want to say that part of this reference to a select committee is going to make negotiations and arguments with the Grants Commission, initially, and with the Commonwealth, more difficult.
There is another way of attending to this before March. Certainly, the police, whilst I have been Minister, have released their reviews. You have seen a major community review released that has a two-year ongoing basis for community reaction on issues and you have had the actual police report on the move on powers. You have seen a very open release of documents that the police make available to me. If I were confident that Mr Moore would not talk down our case, again, before the Grants Commission, I would make more information available. At the moment we have this spoiling exercise that is vote gathering, obviously, and that creates a problem for our Government. It comes from one member, particularly.
Quite frankly, I would trust Mr Connolly with the information. My problem is that I would then have to give it out in a wider forum, and that is a worry. Mr Speaker, the objective of the AFP in the ACT is to continue to improve the quality and responsiveness of police services. I went to a conference yesterday where Professor David Bailey, from the University of New York, who is a leading proponent of community policing and a world authority who has worked with the police forces of many countries around the world, including Australian police forces, said that with financial strains on policing throughout the Western World - and probably in wider areas - the only way we can really attend to those budget and funding gaps is to mobilise community resources to assist in policing.
He believes, as does the assistant commissioner in Queensland, that more than 90 per cent of a police budget goes on human resource management. They are very important issues that we need to argue before the Grants Commission - levels of policing, and the extent to which we can get community support. There are fundamental questions such as: "What is law enforcement?"; "Is a school police education program law enforcement?"; "Is Neighbourhood Watch law enforcement?"; "Is the Police Citizens Boys Club
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