Page 1387 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2006
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$5.3 million. One of the other priorities is the Gungahlin to city busway, which is several years overdue and which involved the commitment of $10 million to capital works projects in, I think, the next year. There are a number of other proposals on capital expenditure that it could go towards.
Even if you used some of that money, indeed all of that money, for recurrent purposes, you would certainly be able to have the extra 100 police for quite a few years before you would have to dip further into the public purse for that recurrent expenditure and you would certainly have very little problem in terms of providing the three extra prosecutors. I commend those ideas to the government. You would certainly be able to do things such as bring back some of the ovals to help combat child obesity. You would certainly be able to fulfil your promise, if you intend to do so, in relation to a dragway. You could do certain things in relation to urban infrastructure improvements. The look of the city is indeed of real concern for lots of citizens. That could well be a capital expenditure that is much more necessary now than funding for a prison.
Mr Corbell: We still have to pay for a new remand centre.
MR STEFANIAK: I hear what Mr Corbell says about the remand centre. All right, it might not be ideal, Mr Corbell, but you have got yourself into a real muddle there. We have managed. We have sent prisoners to New South Wales. I do not think that that is an ideal situation and I, for one, would like to see people who should be in jail actually in jail. As much as I would have liked to have seen a prison built yesterday, I think that the project is one which, because of the muddle you have got yourself into through your own economic mismanagement and incompetence, sadly you could put on hold and spend the money better.
I turn now to one other area where it would be quite easy to save money. I have mentioned in this place on a number of occasions that in the current budget year, 2005-06, the part of the JACS budget for human rights and ancillary officers went from $5 million a year to $7 million a year or thereabouts. There are a number of additional positions, new commissioners, new public service positions. This is particularly relevant when the Chief Minister seems surprised that somehow under his administration an extra 2,000 public servants seem to have magically gone onto the books and appeared over the years without any ministers really being terribly aware of that, which I do find surprising.
I am sure that you can quite easily rattle off where you probably need an extra 500 or so, perhaps for the teaching initiatives which we started with primary school teachers, for example. Sadly, you have done very little in relation to the police. There are more childcare workers, sure. You could probably easily account for about 500 public servants. Where did the other 1,500 come from? One area where I have yet to see anything done for the benefit of ordinary, law-abiding Canberra citizens is the human rights area under the Human Rights Act. We have a burgeoning bureaucracy.
I have heard from talking to public servants that even in areas where you would think that there would be virtually no relevance in terms of human rights, that it is a mere formality that they have to be consulted and a process gone through, delays are being experienced with things as basic as changes to legislation in areas where you would not
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