Page 245 - Week 01 - Thursday, 18 February 1993
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MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (3.48): Mr Deputy Speaker, this debate is in very many ways a complete rehash of a debate that we had on 25 November 1992 because the figures which Mr De Domenico was getting himself worked up about are the figures that appeared in the AFP's annual report, in the chapter on ACT community policing, and they were debated extensively in this chamber on that day. All we did yesterday was take them from the AFP national report and table them in this place, as it is appropriate that those figures get tabled in this Assembly every year. The points that I made then are very much the points that I would make again today.
Firstly, it is quite incorrect to say that this Government says that crime is not a problem. This Government does say that we, like every city in Australia, like every State in Australia, have to deal with the issue of crime within our community. It is a clear Labor Government priority to have Canberra continue to be a safe place; a place where Canberra women, men and children can go about their business without fear of being attacked or set upon or assaulted. As a result we bring through a range of initiatives. Only yesterday we brought through an initiative which strengthens the ability of the police and prosecutors to bring sexual assault matters into the courts - an initiative which, it should be noted, was opposed in substantial measure by the Liberal Party. We introduced, just before Christmas, a new offence in relation to fighting in a public place in order to strengthen the arm of the police in dealing with what was then seen to be a spate of problems in relation to Civic. That hysteria about violence in Civic, which was getting everybody agitated just before Christmas, was responded to by way of a special upping of police numbers in Civic. That seemed to get on top of the problem and those police numbers, as we always said, were scaled back.
There is one fundamental problem that the Liberal Party have in trying to capitalise on this issue. I would have been very interested to know what they said last night when they were out seeking the votes of the 80 people who attended this massively publicised meeting. It was mentioned in every paper. We had the AFP Association running quarter-page ads; we had it editorialised everywhere. The fact that 80 people attended, out of 60,000 in the Tuggeranong Valley, indicates the extent to which people regard this as a political stunt.
The problem for the Liberal Party is that they will say, "Shock, horror; crime is on the rise and you are cutting back on the police". "Stripping the budget", I think, was the phrase that slipped off Mr De Domenico's tongue. But what does their leader say about the police budget? What does Mr Kaine say about the police budget? Mr Kaine says that you have to treat the police budget like any other budget. Mr Kaine, when he was Chief Minister, when he was actually running the show, or purporting to run the show, when speaking of the 1991 police budget, the budget we brought down, said:
The police force will be like any other element of the community and if we have to make cuts they will have to bear their share.
That is what Mr Kaine said in August 1990. On 25 November, last year, when we were debating this very same set of figures, Mr Kaine said, as recorded at page 3450 of Hansard:
In times of recession the budget for policing must be reduced along with all other budgets ...
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