Page 4067 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 22 October 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
There has been a lot of pressure from the Police Association, from the Opposition and, indeed, from the community. I understand that the petition now has over 10,000 signatures, and members of the community attended the two meetings held by my colleague Mrs Nolan and me and also wrote letters to the editor. I think it was quite clear to the Government that there was a lot of feeling about this issue. The Government has pulled back from its previous untenable position, and I think that is very sensible.
Mr Connolly talks about police cuts. As he says, quite rightly, it was never the Opposition's position - nor could it be, when even the Police Association indicated that they were always willing to look at reasonable cuts which did not affect their operational efficiency - that there should, as a bottom line, be no cuts. That was no-one's position. The police were always quite happy to look at reasonable cuts. Indeed, tonight Mr Connolly and Mr Stevenson have flagged one area where $300,000 a year is wasted and can be saved, and that is in police hanging around courts for hours and even days on end. That is something the police are looking at, and it will be taken up in the ultimate settlement of this issue. In any budget, there are always areas that can be cut.
However, I do not resile from any comments I have made on this issue. I restate one fundamental comment: The first duty of any government is the security of its citizens, and that is provided in a Territory or State context by its police force and in a national context by its defence force. When one is looking at budgetary cuts in various areas of government, the last area that should be cut is the ability of government to provide security for its citizens. In this context, the bottom line is the police operational budget.
When one talks about cuts across the board, I suppose no area of government is sacrosanct. The police have never said that they expected to be sacrosanct; they just wanted reasonable cuts. Unfortunately, for about two weeks this Minister and this Government were quite unreasonable about it. They wanted those cuts to come out of one area of the police budget, and that is the operational area. I think the Estimates Committee meeting of 27 September indicated that the majority of the cuts were to come from that area.
A proposed $240,000 out of the $1.2m was coming from another area under the direct control of this Government - police executive services or something like that - but, basically, that $1.2m was coming out of the $10m operational area, from a $53.4m total police budget. That represented 20 per cent of the operational budget. When one looks at the time at which that was meant to come out - February, when we are already two-thirds of the way into the financial year - as the Police Association said, that represented some 15 per cent of the operational budget.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .