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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 8 Hansard (8 August) . . Page.. 2612 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

There must be an election in the air, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker. Mr Hargreaves, the would-be minister for police, the man who called the local AFP officers Keystone Cops and Constable Plods, I think-he later apologised for it, and rightly so-seems to be a bit schizophrenic about what he is saying because this is a quote from Mr Hargreaves in the Chronicle of Tuesday, 31 July 2001:

"Not only does the Government fall well short of their target, they also have not redeployed officers to where they originally said ..." He said residents had been lured into a false sense of security as crime figures continued to escalate and, "the Government has had to resort to fudging the police numbers".

That is not true, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker. I think Mr Hargreaves must have had the graph on its side. If he turned it up the right way he would realise that the graph was going down. The magnificent effort of the AFP in the ACT has reduced crime across the board last financial year by 12 per cent.

Mr Stanhope cannot help himself. Like all hollow men he comes down here with his litany that he has learnt off by heart. That is all he has learnt. This is the man who said, when he became Leader of the Opposition, how the face of Labor had changed. He said they were going to be cooperative and work together, but we have seen none of that. He comes down and he pulls out a productivity report that is already out of date. It was out of date when it was printed. When that report was being put together we were already putting in place operations like Chronicle, Dilute, and Handbrake. We were increasing funding, unlike those opposite who reduced funding. In their last year it went from $54 million to $51 million because they had no commitment to policing in the ACT. They cut policing, unlike us. We have increased the funding to the AFP.

All that Mr Stanhope knows is the things that he has learnt off by heart, and he just comes back with his little litany. He has not had an original thought ever. He says, "Go to the Productivity Commission report. We have the lowest number of sworn officers." Well, that is true. That is because Labor was not allowing police officers to do what they were trained to do, combat crime. We have said, "You, as police officers, should be out there fighting crime, not stuck in offices, not stuck behind desks or staffing radio rooms. You need to be freed up so as to be out there doing what you are trained for, doing what people like Mr Rugendyke were trained for, actually fighting crime." So we actually have a far more effective police force than they could ever run, and we have the proof to prove that that is correct.

The other thing that Mr Stanhope always forgets to tell people about when comparing things is that we are a city state. We are a very small jurisdiction. When he quotes the huge number of officers per 100,000, say, that the Northern Territory has, that is because it covers a huge area of land. We are a city state. We do not have many water police, for instance, unlike those scattered up and down the coast of New South Wales or along Queensland. We maintain some officers on the lake. We, for instance, do not have an air wing. We do not need one. We are entirely different. This is what their blinkered approach is, this is what their simplistic approach is, and this is why we hear their cant without any thought about how they would make a difference.

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