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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 10 Hansard (24 September) . . Page.. 3224 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

The provision of police services in the Parliament House precinct is the responsibility of the ACT Region of the AFP ... Any claims made by members of the AFP under the CIC Act are the responsibility of the Australian Capital Territory Government.

He feels he is unable to give the undertaking that I sought from him - that the Commonwealth would share that cost, if not pay it altogether.

Mr Speaker, I have to say that I am disappointed by that response. To be frank, we are going to have to include issues like that in negotiations about the future of the policing agreement with the Commonwealth. It is another cost we have to bear by having the AFP provide services to this community. Apart from having been short-changed by the Commonwealth over a number of years, we are now being asked, in effect, to pay for the luxury of putting our police - the police we pay for - up onto the hill to get beaten up in demonstrations outside Federal Parliament relating to Federal parliamentary decisions or Federal Government decisions. That all seems extremely unsatisfactory.

MR OSBORNE: I have a supplementary question. What is the situation currently with your conversations with Mr Williams in regard to the appointment of an ACT Police Commissioner?

MR HUMPHRIES: Essentially, that issue also has met with resistance from the Federal Government. I have to say that I am no more confident of being able to advance that issue in the present climate than I am of being able to advance the issue of the Commonwealth meeting the cost of CIC payments for police injured in situations like the Parliament House riots. The Commonwealth Government indicated very clearly, I think last year, through both the Prime Minister and the Attorney-General, that they did not support the statutory appointment of an ACT commissioner as recommended by the Legal Affairs Committee of this place. They rejected the proposal, based on a claimed potential for disruption in the command structures - that there would be two potential sources of authority to individual police officers in the ACT.

I think that again highlights the inappropriateness of an arrangement whereby we pay $52m for a service over which we have an unsatisfactory degree of control. I know this has been raised in a different context. I think Mr Wood might even have been quoted in the media as saying he favoured consideration of an ACT police force.

Mr Wood: No; control of ACT police was my theme.

MR HUMPHRIES: We all favour that. I have to say that I am tending more to the view that the arrangement we have now with the AFP is not the only way in which we should consider, in the future, how we police the Territory.

MR SPEAKER: The supplementary question was very broad, Mr Osborne, but I allowed it.

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