Page 66 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 14 February 2006
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really show is that this government is falling well below target when it comes to the recruitment and training of our hardworking ESA volunteers.
MR HARGREAVES (Brindabella—Minister for Disability, Housing and Community Services, Minister for Urban Services and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (4.28): I would like to address a couple of things that Cassius Clay over there said. “I am the greatest.” He ain’t the greatest. He would not know commonsense from clay, as I have said once before today. Mr Pratt talks about the Productivity Commission’s report and the annual reports. He picks numbers out of a bucket of water and sand, I have to say, and sometimes models it into some sort of prefabricated ceramic doll. Out of that, no-one understands quite what it is he is talking about.
We will give you some indication about policing figures. He does not acknowledge that annual reports are taken in a snapshot in time, like 30 June; that the Productivity Commission’s report has taken two figures at either end and divided them by two; and that neither of them takes into account the full year effect trend. If Mr Pratt had any common courtesy, he would stop denigrating the police and recognise the fact that, over the Christmas period, there were over 800 officers in fact employed within the ACT. But that escapes that man. Sometimes I wonder which has more intelligence, a bucket of sand and water or my colleague across the chamber. I suspect in favour of the bucket of water and sand.
Mr Pratt talks about the trend in volunteer recruiting reversing. This bloke is good at the emotive language. He talks about serious neglect; he talks about having trouble with retention. The fact is that every time he goes near the media he bags the ESA. Nobody would want to go in under the glare of the smoking, flaming mouth of that particular man over there. He is likely to go down there, pop up in their corridors and shout at them. We just cannot have that.
He talks about the CFU volunteers. “The roll out has stalled.” He does not say, “I wonder what there might be difficulties in. Do we have training places available for them? Do we have the infrastructure to support them? Do we have the PPE to support them? Do we have the equipment to support them? Do we have the trained leadership? Do we have the management and training in place for these people, the quantities?” No, he forgets about all that.
Did he bother to credit people like Garth Brice with coming up with another model that needs checking out, which we have agreed to do, so that we can have more units out there than just particular CFUs? Has Mr Pratt decided whether or not efficacy is a good thing out there? No, he has not, because he would not know a CFU from a bucket of clay; he just would not know.
He talks about the government’s predicted deficit, he talks about our deficit, and says, “You cannot pay for it because you have got a massive deficit.” He is the same bloke who has the confidence of the Leader of the Opposition mark 1—or is it 2, maybe 3. Hang on a second, it is mark 1. I was going to think of him as the straw man but, no, he might be a clay man. Mr Pratt over there is advising this bloke, saying, “Yes, go for it, Brendan; we will borrow $600 million or we will guarantee a 7.5 per cent return up front every month.”
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