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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 9 Hansard (3 September) . . Page.. 2820 ..

MR WOOD: I have a supplementary question, Mr Speaker. The Minister says he found out about these deficiencies - only after we were asking the questions, might I say. Mr Speaker, my question to Mr Humphries is this: What agency in the ACT government service monitors the delivery of the police services and checks those reports that you were talking about? How is it that the deficiencies have not been reported to you, or that you did not take any notice of them, and what investigations will you now undertake to see what went wrong?

MR HUMPHRIES: First of all, I did not say that we discovered these deficiencies as a result of questions in this place. The issues were addressed long before that point, and the matter came to my attention well before that point.

Mr Whitecross: You were keeping it a secret.

MR HUMPHRIES: No, I was not. Mr Speaker, I made available to the Estimates Committee in June of this year information which indicated that there was a deficiency.

Mr Whitecross: So you told the Estimates Committee.

MR HUMPHRIES: If you were not listening at the time that is not my fault. We told the Estimates Committee that there was a problem. You should go back and do your homework, Mr Whitecross. No wonder you are sitting in the deputy's chair today and not the leader's chair. Why did I take no notice? I did not know, Mr Wood, that there was a deficiency. I sought weekly reports on the level of staffing, and the weekly reports, if you are interested - you are obviously not interested, as you are talking to somebody else - disclosed that the staffing was being supplied at the contracted level. That is not not taking notice. That is simply not having the information supplied to me in an accurate form.

MR SPEAKER: I hope you are listening to the reply, Mr Wood.

Mr Whitecross: We are.

Mr Wood: We are.

MR HUMPHRIES: I do not think you are. Which agency is responsible for these things? The Attorney-General's Department is responsible for monitoring those figures. They, like me, assumed the accuracy of the figures supplied by the Federal Police.

MR MOORE: Mr Speaker, my question is to the Chief Minister. Chief Minister, you recently argued that you will be regulating home gambling products, including regulation of the Internet. Are you aware that a group of Australians at Vaduz in Liechtenstein are currently running a very popular gambling system using major credit cards? Considering that anyone with access to the Internet can now just type in www.interlotto.li to gamble this very minute, is it not rather quixotic to believe that you can regulate this international market?

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