Page 4953 - Week 16 - Tuesday, 26 November 1991
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it is the Government's budget and it is going to have to live with it. While I might like to have moved some money around and pressed the Government to the limit, and if they wanted to go to an election, so be it - maybe everyone else wimped out there - I can see that there is a convention there. The bottom line is that this Government is going to have to live with its budget, and this is one of its big problem areas.
The Government has dropped $1.2m, on its figures, or more, if you look at some figures supplied by the Police Association, from last year's maintenance of law and order part of the budget, which is the police part of the budget. The Government found itself in all sorts of problems in this area because for some time it refused to concede that the cuts were not going to be across the board but rather were cuts which would come out of about 20 per cent of the budget. In the Estimates Committee on the last Friday in September the Attorney did concede that.
It was painfully obvious from a directive put out by Assistant Commissioner Dawson that about $1.4m was to be cut from the $8.5m operating budget that remained for the last nine months of the financial year. That was to cause huge problems for the efficient policing of the Territory. A lot of toing-and-froing has gone on since then. I think the Police Association and the police themselves adopted a very responsible attitude by conceding that they did not like the cuts but they would accept them because we are in hard economic times, as long as they were right across the board.
Perhaps the Government was quite wrong in insisting that we have 706 police officers. If 10 positions, for example, went back to the Commonwealth - I am not talking about redundancies; I am talking about positions going back to the Commonwealth - that would be, effectively, about 80 per cent of what the Labor Government wanted to cut. But that did not happen and the Government got itself into all sorts of bother.
I have said until I am blue in the face that the last area of any budget that should be cut is the police budget, the maintenance of law and order. The first duty of any government is the maintenance of the security of its citizens, and at Territory and State level that is the police force. That being said, if you are to cut a police budget, the last area you cut is the operational services. Unfortunately, that is an area that has been cut. Indeed, there are a couple of operational areas within that budget that have been cut as of now, hence the motion that I will put to the Assembly at the end of my speech.
I am not too sure whether some of the very successful crime prevention devices the police use in their operational area have now been cut or are in the process of being phased out. I am very concerned to know what the state of play is with such effective crime prevention units as the anti-theft squad, which was to be disbanded and perhaps has been
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