Page 4064 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 22 October 1991
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It is abundantly clear that, if we were a community of 300,000 and not the national capital, we would not need 706 police to provide the security that this community rightly demands. We would need far less than that. I believe that the New South Wales police, when asked what they provide for a community of this size, were looking at a force of something in the order of 250. That may be well below what is required, but we clearly would not require 706. We doubled the number of officers funded by the Commonwealth in our first few months in office, and that was a significant achievement.
The police budget has been, one could almost say, out of control; at least it has been showing growth at an unprecedented rate in the last few years. The documentation attached to last year's Grants Commission report showed, as I said earlier, 47 per cent in the last four years. In the year in which the police contract was signed - the contract that was rather severely criticised by the Canberra Times in yesterday's editorial - the budget increased 14 per cent, in a climate in which inflation was well below that.
What Mr Kaine said last year was absolutely right, and we did not criticise it. Mr Kaine said that we have one year's guaranteed funding for the police, that the Commonwealth have said that they will pay the whole tab. Beyond that the Commonwealth have said, "You are on your own. You will get general grant funding, as in every other area, and you will have to sort it out yourself". What Mr Kaine said last year was essentially what we said: The police will have to take their share of cuts.
When this announcement was made the Police Association said, "Shock, horror! You have told us to absorb this in administrative costs and overtime and penalty rates, not in staff numbers. We demand that we lose some jobs". That was their view, well reported in the editorial yesterday. Again I give the Liberal Party credit for not attempting to deny their statements of last year. Mr Kaine maintained a very clear and consistent line on this. Quoting from the Canberra Times of 9 October:
Mr Kaine said he agreed the police could not be quarantined from ACT Budget cuts, but he disagreed with the way in which the Attorney-General ... had implemented reductions.
At that stage the Government was saying that we would like, as our first best option, for police management and the police unions to talk about ways of achieving this saving, which is, at the end of the day, 2 per cent, at a time when, as the Canberra Times said, most other programs have been cut by something like 8 per cent and the Territory as a whole has had a 20 per cent reduction in Commonwealth funding. Mr Kaine said, "You should not try to quarantine it only to the discretionary budget; you should go across the board".
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