Page 4960 - Week 16 - Tuesday, 26 November 1991
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MR KAINE: If it is not true, in what way have you changed your budget by $1 as a result of the Estimates Committee process, Mr Connolly? You tell me where the $1 change is. There is not a $1 change in the budget you put on the table. We go through the estimates process, where members shred out the budget - - -
Mr Moore: What dollar change did you make last year?
MR KAINE: There were no good proposals put forward last time; but this year there were some very significant proposals. One of them related to the way in which the Government chopped the police budget. I am on the public record as saying that I agree that the police budget should not be sacrosanct, any more than anybody else's should be. But, as in every instance when you shred out a budget, it is not the fact that a budget cut was imposed - or, since the Assembly has not yet passed the Appropriation Bill, it is not the way in which a budget cut has been proposed - it is how that has been interpreted by the Government and the emphasis it puts on its budget cuts.
Mr Stefaniak is quite entitled to say to the Government, by whatever means are available to him, "I do not agree with the way you have made the cuts". He is quite entitled to say that there are two, what he believes to be, essential police services that have been chopped out because of the way the cuts have been imposed. He is trying, in the only way we can determine is available to him or to any other member of the Assembly, to suggest to the Government that they got it wrong.
You can be bloody-minded, as you have been up until now, and not accept any recommendation for any change in your budget of any order of magnitude at all; or you can listen to Mr Stefaniak and go back to your offices when this debate is over and say, "Was Mr Stefaniak right? Is there a strong view out there, not only in the Australian Federal Police Association but in the community, that these two essential police services ought to be reinstated in the budget?". If you have any sense of priority and any sense of social equity, which you keep talking about, you will at least go away and think about it. Instead of Mr Moore jumping to his feet and making a personal attack on Mr Stefaniak, perhaps the Government should respond. I hope that they will respond more intelligently and more sensitively than Mr Moore did on their behalf.
I repeat that there seems to be no mechanism by which a member of this Assembly who is not a member of the Government can influence the shape of the budget. The Government simply digs its toes in and says, "We are not going to listen to you. We have made our decision. We know what is right. We are better informed than any of you. We have better judgment about what the community wants than any of you. Do not bother telling us about how it ought to change. We are not going to change it by a single dollar".
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