Page 4066 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 22 October 1991
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We will find over the next 12 months that we will have a high-quality, efficient police service for this Territory, as we have enjoyed for many years, but done with a little less money. Even Mr Stevenson admitted that. He said that in his experience as a police officer in years gone by he had spent many hours, probably adding up to months, hanging around the Magistrates Court waiting to give evidence. It is clear that in areas such as that - and Mr Stefaniak and Mrs Nolan have acknowledged it - there are savings to be made.
There was an enormous amount of rhetoric, of stuff and nonsense, about police cuts in the first few weeks. There was this "You are all going to be killed in your beds" shock, horror stuff. I described it at the time as a political campaign. I think that was quite accurate. The meetings were chaired by a then member of the Liberal Party who is now running for office again as a separate party. That is Mrs Nolan's democratic right, and it is her democratic right to run on what may be called a law and order campaign. But I say again that the alarmism that was agitated at the time was merely that.
What critics of the Government's budget cuts will have to face up to in a few months' time - and I do not include the Leader of the Opposition in this because his statements last year and this year have been consistent - is that the AFP can operate in a climate of restraint, just as every other arm of administration can and just as, let us face it, every arm of private enterprise can. It is not only the public sector at Commonwealth and State level that has had to operate in the last few years in an environment of repeated savings, repeated economies, repeated ways of doing more with less; the private sector has had to do the same thing.
The Australian Federal Police, which is a fine body of uniformed officers and a competent body of managers, will achieve ways of delivering to the people of the Australian Capital Territory the high-quality police service they have come to expect. I am utterly confident that they will achieve that within the constraints the Government has imposed upon them. I am reassured by the remarks in yesterday's editorial, which very rationally and reasonably essentially reiterated the Government's campaign. The scaremongering of certain members of the Opposition has been discredited. The Government will be successful in its responsible approach to delivering a police force we can afford.
MR STEFANIAK (8.27): Contrary to what Mr Connolly says, I think what he calls the scaremongering of certain people in the Opposition has been totally vindicated. I listened with interest to his speech because he and the Government have come back from the crazy, ludicrous position of potentially having substantial cuts made to the wrong area of the ACT police budget, that is, the operational area.
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