Page 4062 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 22 October 1991
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I was incredibly tempted this evening simply to get up and read verbatim yesterday's Canberra Times editorial, because that said it all. It said that the Police Association in their remarkable political campaign had overstepped the mark. It said, accurately, that most ACT politicians accept that we live in an era of restraint where we must make realistic decisions. Mr Kaine and I have often crossed swords, and no doubt we will continue to do so until the next election. That is the way it should be in an open democratic system. But Mr Kaine is a person who has looked at a balance sheet or two in his time and who knows the reality of economics.
I quoted a statement of his repeatedly to the Estimates Committee, much to their annoyance; but as I said then, and I will say it now, he put it as well as I could have put it. On 8 August last year Mr Uhlmann in the Canberra Times, under the heading "Budget cuts likely for ACT police", said:
The ACT section of the Australian Federal Police could face budget cuts from next year, the Chief Minister, Trevor Kaine, said yesterday.
It quotes Mr Kaine, then Chief Minister and Treasurer, as saying:
There is no continuing commitment beyond this year and we will have to review [the police budget] and make a decision about what it should be from then on.
That was in the context of the first year of the police agreement, in which the Commonwealth had agreed to fund the whole package. That first-year agreement, it should be noted, involved a remarkable 14 per cent increase in the police budget from the year before. In the last four years the police budget has jumped 47 per cent.
Mr Stevenson says that there has been an ongoing history of cutbacks and reductions in the AFP budget in the ACT; that is simply not so. We spend now, after the allegedly awful Labor cutbacks, 47 per cent more than we did four years ago. That is vastly above the rate of inflation. Mr Kaine then said, and this is the quote that I used repeatedly, and it is a very sensible statement from Mr Kaine:
The police force will be like any other element of the community and if we have to make cuts they will have to bear their share.
In the lead-up to the budget there has been some alarmism. There have been statements from opposition members - that is their job, and I do not begrudge their attacking the Government; that is what they are there for - that the Labor Government was going to be targeting the police force, attacking the police force, and so on. I said to
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