Page 250 - Week 01 - Thursday, 18 February 1993
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MR HUMPHRIES (4.06): I want to address some of the furphies which we have seen put up particularly by Mr Connolly in this debate so far.
Mr Connolly: A fine parliamentary word, Mr Humphries.
MR HUMPHRIES: It is a fine word and it suits very well a lot of the things that have been said by the Minister in the course of this debate. I will take them one at a time. I have identified at least six and I am sure that there are many others that my colleagues will identify as well in the course of what they have to say. First of all, there is this favourite argument of Mr Connolly's, frequently quoted both here and outside this place, that the relative overstaffing of the police force compared with other States, the relatively large amount of money we spend per capita on our police, justifies the present round of cuts.
I believe that there are major problems with that approach. First of all, the cuts that you make in response to a particular situation have to be intelligent; they have to be carefully targeted; they have to be carefully planned. They cannot be just like a person saying, "I weigh too much so I will cut off my leg". That, I would submit, is exactly what this Government has been doing. The cuts have been most demonstrably at the pointy end, so to speak, of our police budget. They have been in areas of extremely high profile. I really wonder how much control the Minister has had over the management of that budget. I wonder how much the police have told him, "Here is where we are cutting, Minister", and how much he himself has been able to say, "I want these areas, or these areas, or these areas, cut".
The second answer to that furphy is that timing is vitally important. When Mr Kaine made the comment that the police must not be exempt from the same budget constraints as other parts of the ACT's expenditure, crime was not rising at five times the rate of population growth this Territory is currently experiencing. We were not in the level of crisis.
Mr Connolly: We were.
MR HUMPHRIES: We were not, Mr Connolly. The fact of life is that the comments that he made, the ones that you are continually quoting, were made in a very different environment. I might also point out that we have to take account of the circumstances in which these cuts are made, lest we exacerbate the problem. Even Mr Berry, our illustrious Minister for Health, would not go cutting back hospital funding during a cholera epidemic or while the Territory was racked by bubonic plague or in the aftermath of a major earthquake, and that, I would submit, is exactly what is happening here. We have crime rising at five times the rate of our population growth. You accuse us of being hysterical about that but it is pretty serious. Why should the ACT's assault rate climb by nearly 38 per cent in the course of 12 months?
Mr Connolly: But, you see, you look at just one year's figures. Assault causing grievous bodily harm declined.
MR HUMPHRIES: They are one year's figures for one category. Let us look at another set of figures: Burglary of dwellings is up by more than 20 per cent in one year. The population rose by only 3 per cent in that one year; why should there be such a large rise? Shop stealing is up by 22.3 per cent. What is the explanation for that? This is a crisis, Mr Connolly. If you are not prepared to admit it, you obviously are choosing to ignore the facts staring you in the face.
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