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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 991 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

services and the perception of safety. Mr Rugendyke's proposal is a way to address that perception of community safety. Whilst we agree with that, some may think it is premature if we try to change the nature of the services before the inquiry is concluded.

I also note the opposition of the ACT's Chief Police Officer to the introduction of the model, if his public statements are any indication, so it would take a bit of muscle flexing and an expression of will on the part of our Minister to insist on it. I do not know whether he would get away with it between now and when the purchaser/provider agreement is done, but we will see the metal of the Minister at that time.

I also wish to point out that we did agree that if money was available we would like to see the extension of Mr Rugendyke's proposal, as he said to us when he gave evidence. His initial proposal was to have two suburbs served by one policeman and that that would be in three regions. I think he was doing that because he had one eye on the budget and one eye on what he actually wanted, and that was a responsible way to go about it. But he did say that ideally we ought to have coverage across all of the residential suburbs in the ACT. By my reckoning, Mr Speaker, that would be 50 policemen. Based on the average salary and some on-costs, you are looking at something around the $4.5m mark. That, according to my calculations, is roughly 25 per cent of the cost of the car race. So it is not a figure which is way out of the realms of possibility. It is well within the realms of possibility. I would like to have further justification given to us in the context of the inquiry before making a particularly strong recommendation to the Government about that.

On top of that, Mr Speaker, the proposals were costed by the Government. I thought it was remarkable that the Government could cost that so quickly, yet they cannot cost the prison. We are still waiting for that, nine months down the track. We are still waiting. Naughty, naughty. Of course, sometimes, if you are a little bit hasty, a little bit too quick, you can make mistakes, as I think the Government has done in its costings. I think my report shows the numbers so I will not go into those, Mr Speaker.

I also disagreed with the approach the committee took on the recruitment of firefighters. We did agree that there was enough money provided. The Government has said that it will provide a number of firefighters. The numbers vary between 12 and 17. I am happy to see that. The Government was saying that they wanted to get away from the college training model and do a little bit of lateral recruitment, a little bit of basic recruitment, but I could not quite figure out what they were talking about. I believe that they ought to stay with the older method. We ought to be resourcing this under the older method until such time as the stakeholders have come to an agreement under the enterprise bargaining arrangements because in that way we will have a combination of the minds of all of the people affected. They will know how the change in the process will affect them. I am sure that the United Firefighters Union will not sign off on something which will work to the detriment of the members.

I want to make two further points about the Fire Brigade, Mr Speaker. More than 12 months ago I asked for a breakdown of the budget for the Fire Brigade and I was told that it was not possible to drag out the figures. I told the management and the Minister and the chief executive of the department that it was possible to pull them out from ORACLE. I had that in my previous experience before coming here. "No, it is not

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