Page 325 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 1 March 1994
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The other thing Mr Humphries accuses us of is not prioritising within government; that we do not accord a sufficient priority to policing as opposed to other arms of government.
Mr Humphries: That is right.
MR CONNOLLY: He nods; he says, "That is right". Let us see what you did when you were sitting in Cabinet and when this bloke was the Treasurer. When you were running this show, you spent more on public transport recurrent subsidy than you did on policing.
Mr Humphries: Public transport?
MR CONNOLLY: That is right. It is extraordinary, is it not? You regarded the ACTION recurrent subsidy of $57m as presumably more important than the police budget at $54.5m.
Mr Humphries: Rubbish!
MR CONNOLLY: It is not rubbish; it is in the budget papers.
Mr Kaine: I raise a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. When the Alliance Government was in place, the police function was still being run by the Commonwealth.
MR CONNOLLY: Mr Deputy Speaker, the allocation of funding for policing, which transferred during the life of the Alliance Government, was $54.5m, as shown in the budget papers. The allocation for the recurrent subsidy of ACTION in that same year was $57m. This year the allocation for ACTION, as shown in the budget papers, is just under $45m and the allocation for policing is some $53m. So we show our priorities on this issue. We have demonstrated that we can pick an area of Government expenditure where we need to prune substantially and deliver savings, which you patently failed to do; whereas policing we regard as an important priority, and we do set savings targets.
Members may have noticed a little piece on page 3 of the Canberra Times this morning which I was quite pleased to see, although I must confess that I did not expect that it would have hit the Canberra Times. It was something I thought would have received more attention within the police force. The fact is that the Government has been doing something to change the police culture in terms of management practices and imposing some financial stringency there, making the Federal Police realise that they live in a real budgetary world where there is not access to unlimited funding and that we do have a problem in the ACT, where we have had a per capita policing expenditure way in excess of any State in Australia and exceeded only by the Northern Territory. What has happened over the last 12 months is that the AFP in Canberra have got to a position where, as is reported in the Canberra Times, they are well in surplus in terms of where they should be in their financial management for this year.
As a result of very clever planning by senior AFP management - as a result of Mr Dawson's process of devolving financial responsibility to the four regions which now service Canberra, as opposed to the three which used to operate, to give more direct accountability for people in Tuggeranong - they are up substantially on their funding position. Mr Dawson is therefore able to ease the
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