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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (17 February) . . Page.. 242 ..

MR HARGREAVES (11.42): I rise to support the motion. The Attorney-General, the Minister for police, said that when his Government came to office they found that the arrangements were unsatisfactory. That was five years ago. People have been born, lived their lives and died in that time. You reckon it would have been enough time to have extracted the digit and got on with it, but no. We still wait.

When we have agitated within our standing committee for some information about this new whiz-bang, all bells and whistles policing arrangement, we have been given the information that we are going to change the way it looks; that we are going to have a head of agreement and a purchaser/provider model underneath it. That is fantastic and that is great, but it does not tell us very much about the detail. It is the detail that we are concerned about.

On occasions the Minister for police has gone public and said that the committee has been briefed in detail about progression of the new policing arrangements. The truth is that we have been told about that head of agreement and the purchaser/provider model. We have been told nothing else. There has been no detail whatsoever. We are heartily sick and tired of waiting, and I am sure the rest of the ACT is sick and tired of waiting. Of course members of the police are sick and tired of waiting.

The Minister also said that he suspects this inquiry will tell us what we already know. If you already know what the problem is, why on earth do you sit on your tail instead of doing something about it before now? It is an exercise of either gross idiocy or incompetence. I do not really care which one you take.

This inquiry is intended to tap into the minds of people in the community who have a concern about our policing services. I want to make this absolutely clear. We are not talking about the quality of our individual policemen. The quality of our individual policemen is beyond par in this country. We have the best police in the country. They are the most highly trained. They are the most deeply motivated. They are professionals in every sense of the word. We have one advantage that the rest of the country does not have. I am sure Mr Rugendyke will agree with me on this. He is the most recent exit from the police force to come here. Our police men and women live within our community. When they go to work, they already know how our community feels about the issues of community safety. They bring that particular concept to their professionalism, and we get the best product in the country.

However, they go to work amidst a haze of suspicion and fear. They are scared about their jobs; they are scared about their career prospects. They see icons around them like Ron Macfarlane getting it in the neck. Is it any wonder that these people are providing a service by the seat of their pants half the time?

What worries me an awful lot is that we are asking our police to stand between the citizenry and harm. We are asking them to cop it so that we do not have to. We are asking them to hone their instincts and get out there and react on our behalf. At the same time we are scaring the living daylights out of them. What is happening is that their minds are not totally on the job. Why would they be? It worries me that one of these days a policeman is going to be put between a citizen and harm, not react the way they

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