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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 1982 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

This decision seems to have been built from the bottom up. Obviously, the senior members of the police force have to be quite circumspect in what they say, but I am unconvinced from what I have heard that, if additional funds were provided to the AFP management, they would be spent on a beat police program as their judgement as to the best way of improving the public safety and attacking the crime rate within this territory. I am sure that we will find that senior police will come out and accept the decision. However, I am not sure that, underneath all that, it is their choice as to how best to police the territory.

Recommendation 40 relates to the funding of roads and it is there that I want to make two comments in relation to the budget overall. What this budget does have is a label, a catchcry, of social capital, which I think is a pretty cynical little exercise. Mr Corbell has already made some comments on that. (Extension of time granted.) We are seeing not a lot of funds, I have to say, being dissipated over 19 or so programs which, to my mind, really do not represent much more than photo opportunities and little launches that we can look forward to and to a large extent this social capital label does deserve the scorn which is gathering in relation to it outside of this place.

The only other comment I will make about the budget is that we have seen develop a PR pattern-I guess it is consistent with the way this government operates-whereby next year we are going to spend a bit of money on the roads or we are going to spend a bit of money on the hospital, but over the next five or six years we are going to spend huge amounts. The banners and the wad of press releases that were pre-prepared to go out with this budget were all about these programs.

Mr Humphries: What else would they be about-the weather?

MR QUINLAN: They are about programs for $5 million this year, but hundreds of millions of dollars over five or six years.

Mr Corbell: Very convenient.

MR QUINLAN: Yes. It is a way of having inflated numbers and inflated press releases and making commitments way beyond the actual substance of the budget or the financial year coming up. Good luck to you if the press swallow it and good luck to you if you get PR points out of it, but I still stand by the assertion that it is based more on PR than on substance.

In relation to roads, if we would look around we will see the poor condition of some of our roads. We have programs for addressing traffic congestion, a new roads program, a drainsmart program, a streetsmart program, a shopsmart program or whatever. They are all PR exercises, but they are about things that it is necessary to do. Necessary maintenance programs are wrapped up as some sort of far-sighted program. Really, the whole thing is designed to invent and to create large numbers for media consumption.

I join Mr Kaine in saying that, given the constraints on time that this committee had, this estimates process was a very successful process. I thought that the spirit that pervaded the committee room for the greater part of the hearings was very good. I have to compliment the ministers who appeared before the committee and their public servants on the good-natured way that most of the Estimates Committee hearings were conducted.

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