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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 13 Hansard (26 November) . . Page.. 4745 ..

MR SMYTH: In a forward year you have put aside $40 million. But is that guaranteed? No it is not. Have you appropriated $40 million in your budget?

Mr Stanhope: You appropriated nothing.

MR SMYTH: It is always this twisting from Jon Stanhope. Do you notice it, Mr Speaker? Twist, twist, twist. If we were giving out games for Christmas, Jon Stanhope would get Twister every year. Twister, twister, twister. Off he goes. There he is twisting what he is going to do, twisting it this way, twisting it that way.

But let's go back to the policy. This is the beauty of Labor Party policy. You have to love Labor Party policy.

Mr Corbell: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: if Mr Stanhope gets Twister, Mr Smyth gets Snakes and Ladders.

MR SPEAKER: I do not think that one is a point of order.

MR SMYTH: Maybe we will find out next sitting week what you will get for Christmas, Mr Corbell. Perhaps you will get a game of Scruples.

The Labor Party make some interesting policies, which make fabulous reading, but you have to have downloaded it from the web. What did they do the day after the election? They took all their policies off the web because they didn't want people to know what they had promised. But we kept a copy.

Let's go to police numbers. "Putting the focus back on the police. What are we going to do? We're going to build it up to the national average."Where are we? The national average currently is 282 officers per 100,000. After two years of a Stanhope Labor government it is 241 officers per 100,000. Shame, shame!

Let's go to police powers. Labor is committed to delivering the right balance between the police powers required to tackle crime and the rights of the ordinary citizen. Mr Wood would love to wind back those bail provisions, but if he checks his crime stats he will find that Operation Anchorage reduced household crime and vehicle theft by substantial numbers. It was the first program to do so, and it was backed up because we found that these people were being caught not once or twice but in some cases three, four, five or six times. The bail amendments that we made stopped that.

Going back to early intervention, we read, "We need to focus on the health and education of young people, on support for young people and their families and on guiding and supporting young people through their teenage years."This is in their justice and community safety policy, and we have had a report on mental health and the health of young Canberrans.

But what has happened? Until the budget last year, which Mr Stanhope is so proud of, there were 14 crime prevention programs. How many are there now? Four. "That's it! We're going to have programs out there to stop them. We're going to have less, and we're going to be proud of this."

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