Page 3562 - Week 12 - Thursday, 19 September 1991
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I put up a suggestion to have a committee of this Assembly look into this very issue, so that we could resolve the problems, so that we could look at how policing should be undertaken and so that we could improve our crime prevention expenditure. As far as I am concerned, that crime prevention could largely have been carried on by the police themselves. They have already moved some of the way to doing that. However, that committee was not to be. I still argue that that was largely through the influence of the man who managed to negotiate a police force at double the cost it should have been. What a great negotiator!
It is just a shame that Mr Kaine was not able to act a little earlier than he did to fire the Residents Rally and to fire Mr Collaery from the ministry, unlike the rewritten history of the Residents Rally, as Matthew Abraham put it to Bernard Collaery this morning on radio, who like to argue that they resigned over schools, or something. This is just a little reminder; they were fired. I think, Mr Kaine, you would agree that "fire" is the appropriate word to use.
Mr Kaine: I do not have any comment.
MR MOORE: Mr Kaine interjects that he does not wish to comment. Fine; I can understand that. But I do know that when I get things wrong Mr Kaine is very quick to interject.
I would like to come back now to the concept of borrowing. I know that this was raised by Mr Kaine to a certain extent. As a rule, I do not believe that it is appropriate for us to borrow; but there is a way in which we can do it and a time when we should consider it, and that is when we come to development issues where the Territory can actually see that in the long term a profit will be made out of borrowing. That does not apply, for example, to the building of roads, or something, where we cannot expect to regain the revenue.
However, we could, for example, negotiate with Federal Government departments - I have raised this issue before - to take their office blocks and office positions to places like Gungahlin and Tuggeranong. In those cases it would be quite appropriate for the Territory Government to borrow, to in effect become the developer, in the first place; or, better still, to work a joint development with some of the commercial developers in order to secure the office blocks in Tuggeranong and in Gungahlin, where we need them. That would not only retain the Canberra plan but also be a very positive move for the construction industry.
It is appropriate that we now strive to make positive moves not only in terms of the construction industry and the jobs that it will bring but also in terms of putting into effect the very positive aspects of the Canberra plan as far as the decentralisation of our work force goes. That is just one positive aspect. It is one way in which we should
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