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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 990 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

To be quite frank, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I do not trust that process because I believe that deals are often done. I cannot support this process which has the standing committees being a budget section within the bureaucracy. As Mr Wood quite rightly pointed out, governments have a full department to determine the impacts of budgets and to do the number crunching. Ministers' offices have a significant number of staff to do this sort of thing. Committees have a secretary and we have our own staff, but, as you would know, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, we do not sit around in our offices waiting for budget reports to be developed. There are many other things that occupy our time. Quite simply, we do not have the resources, and often some standing committees do not have the experience, the expertise or the education to be a budget section of the Executive arm of government. I just want to reiterate that opposition and crossbench members are not accountable to the community for the distribution of money to facilitate government programs.

Standing committees ought not be given a bucket of money by the Executive and encouraged to allocate funds to priorities of its choosing, as I have said before. In this process, as my chairman has indicated, the committee was offered - whether formally or informally matters not - $1.5m, which eventually dropped to $500,000, for us to distribute by way of recommendation to the Government. Of course, if the Government picked up that recommendation and there was public flak over it, the Government could point to the committee and say, "Well, you did it". It is not our role to perform part of the functions of the Executive Government.

On top of that, Mr Speaker, the numbers did not stack up anyway. The million dollars was there and then it disappeared. It disappeared because it was predicated on three options that the Government had the choice of picking up, and there was no indication to the committee of whether or not the Government had them up. Had the Minister said to the committee, "The budget for the Justice and Community Safety Department is now this figure and would you like to look at priorities within that?", the process may have been workable. Merely to give us a bucket of money and say, "Here you are, give this to your favourite program", does not work. In fact, it meant that members on the committee had to make choices about priorities, which they ought not have had to do.

Mr Speaker, in my report I have listed those items with which I concur and I will not address those. I will leave them for members to consider at their leisure. In terms of the recommendation for beat policing services for the ACT, essentially what we are recommending is a change in the nature of the delivery of policing services in the ACT. I think the committee was unanimous in saying that the idea was a good one. The trial that Mr Rugendyke took part in in Kaleen was evaluated as a good one and ought to be continued. We did not reject the evaluation, as it appears the AFP management has, and then roll it into some obscure concept of the complete constable. In fact, I take Mr Rugendyke's point. Your country town policeman is as near to the complete constable as you are ever going to get. We are united, I think, in believing that this process ought to go on.

However, I want to point out to the Assembly that there is a possible inconsistency here. The Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety has received a charter put forward by our chairman to conduct an inquiry into policing services in the ACT, and that is because there is disquiet out there in the community about the level of policing

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