Page 4070 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 22 October 1991
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I wish to make a couple of other points. Mr Connolly has made great play of the Grants Commission and of the agreement signed last year by Mr Collaery. I refer him to schedule E, paragraph 4, in relation to the funding base, which reads:
The Commonwealth gives a commitment to the ACT that special transitional problems encountered in the provision of policing will be taken into account in determining general transitional arrangements for 1991-92 and 1992-93 and the levels of any special revenue assistance.
(Extension of time granted) Finally, I refer him to page 27 of the Grants Commission report, which states in relation to police:
For the first group, we assessed a transitional allowance equal to the per capita difference between standardised and actual expenditure in 1989-90. Police expenditure was the only category treated in this way.
It went on to say that health and medical services, education and parks and wildlife received only three-quarters of the allowance. So, police were treated differently, just as they are in the Northern Territory, and there are good reasons for that. The ACT and the Northern Territory have some problems associated with policing that are unique to them and different from those of any other State, hence the Grants Commission accepting that funding has to be different and that they have to be funded more than the other States.
The Attorney-General has probably learnt a salient lesson at the beginning of his political career, and one that might stand him in good stead in relation to this dispute. He made the wrong decision initially; hopefully, he has seen the light. He is now fairly irrelevant to the debate because the police and their national body seem to be sorting it out themselves. I look forward to seeing the results of tomorrow's deliberations.
MR COLLAERY (8.39): I shall confine my remarks to putting on the record some of the procedural steps that the Attorney-General should have gone through carefully prior to the imposition upon him by the Under Treasurer of the Government, who made a similar proposal to me shortly before I left government, of a proposal to consent to a cut in police funding.
Section 8 of the Australian Federal Police Act sets out the functions of the Australian Federal Police. They are to provide, among other things, police services in relation to the ACT. In a new provision, section 8(1A), the Act was amended to allow the Federal Minister and the ACT to enter into arrangements for the provision of police services in the ACT that are in respect of Territory functions. The Act, very unusually, has an enjoinder in it, namely:
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