Page 4962 - Week 16 - Tuesday, 26 November 1991
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MR CONNOLLY: He is consistent. He says that I should listen to him. What he is suggesting is that Mr Stefaniak is making suggestions about how the cut should be applied. I wish Mr Stefaniak paid a bit more attention during the Estimates Committee hearings. The police shopfront service was floated very early in the piece as a proposal for a savings initiative. When we went through the Estimates Committee detail stage, it was very apparent that there were ongoing leases there; that to get out of those leases would be expensive; and that, essentially, that was not on the cards for this year. That has been the position since the Estimates Committee. It was clearly not an option to get out of those leases.
As to the crime prevention program, there is $20,000 of advertising that we have pulled out of there. We think we will be able to get that run elsewhere. At the national Police Ministers conference on Friday, it was agreed that there would be a national initiative on crime prevention, and we will be a party to that.
The position has always been that we set a budget for the police and they deliver a service within that budget. We decided this year - as clearly Mr Kaine would have decided if he had still been in government - that the police ought to take a modest cut. We expected that the police should live within a cut of about 2 per cent. The rhetoric from Mr Stefaniak on that cut has really had to be heard to be believed. He had a very good rhetorical line that was terrific until last Thursday. It went something like this: The first responsibility of government is to its citizens. At the national level, the first responsibility is the defence of the realm. At the State or Territory level, the first responsibility is policing, and you should never cut those areas. Unfortunately, Dr John blew that out on Thursday, because he has proposed a $200m hack into the defence budget.
I was interested to note that the rhetoric this evening was that the first responsibility of the state is to its citizens. He went straight to the policing and ignored defence because his Federal Liberal Party colleagues have somewhat put the kybosh on that fine piece of rhetoric. Listening to the statements of Mr Stefaniak and the high degree of agitation about what is going to happen, one almost wonders what will happen with the remaining 97 3/4 per cent of the police budget that they have retained. One gets the impression that every useful service came out of the 2 per cent that we have cut.
The simple fact is - Mr Moore made this point, so I do not need to really stress it again - that we consistently spend more on police than does any other State or Territory, apart from the Northern Territory. We consistently are told by the Grants Commission that we have to cut back on police numbers. We have a police to population ratio in the ACT that is better than that of New South Wales,
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