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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Wednesday, 25 August 2004) . . Page.. 4171 ..

lots of rent, as it were. We have assisted victims of domestic violence to ensure that people in these circumstances are no longer excluded from accessing public housing because there may be a debt from the previous tenancy.

We have ended the requirement—how is this for a significant measure; something you would not do—for two weeks in advance. It has gone. It has been part of the system for I suppose 80 years. It is quite a heavy impost on people at the time of moving into a property. We said, “No; you don’t have to pay in advance.” That is a significant move.

People made some remarks about affordable housing. We have taken considerable steps in that regard. As I said yesterday, tomorrow there will be a ministerial statement on that. We provided $13.4 million for homelessness. You just ignored the problem; you did not want to know. You never put an additional cent into it, over and above what you had to do to match Commonwealth. You never put an additional cent in. You ignored the problem. You pretended there was not a problem. We had to do extra work to catch up because of this enormous backlog.

We provided $6 million for community housing. Mr Quinlan has spoken about the other matters. We reintroduced—you knocked it off—the rental bonds scheme. You did not think that was important; the community did. You can be asked to pay $600, $700 or $800 just for key money. You knocked off any assistance in that regard. We have reintroduced it to help people. We have done so much in that area as well.

There are other matters I want to talk about. There is just so much I should say about ACT housing—there are massive pages of stuff—but I want to get onto community safety as well as other things. The lowest number of police we had in the ACT was at the time of the East Timor intervention by the Commonwealth. AFP personnel went to East Timor. The numbers of police in the ACT shrank alarmingly at that time. They did not have a minister who negotiated with the AFP and the Commonwealth to look after the ACT. When police went to Bougainville, we were not impacted. But when they went to East Timor, our numbers—I forget who the minister was at the time; he probably did not even know about it; he probably did not pay it any attention—shrank alarmingly.

We have kept to our election commitment. Yes, there was an aim to look at national figures. But the election commitment—what we promised at the time of the election—was an extra 20 police over a period. And we have done that. We have more than done that. On top of that we added 10 police and there will be another 10 police next year. Dare I say to you—you will not want to hear it—that, in your time, you did not add anything anywhere. You just floated along, let it go, and at a certain time let the numbers run down.

Mrs Dunne: So which 98 per cent isn’t true?

MR WOOD: You come back with the figures. You put no extra money into the system at all. Let us look at trends in crime. Crime figures go up and down over a period. Let me tell you about the current trend. It has been a fairly persistent trend during the time that we have been in government. In 2003, compared to other years, we did extremely well.

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