Page 1969 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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on luxuries during lean times and cutting it on essentials during lean times. That just does not make sense. The just-released Institute of Public Affairs report Opportunity squandered of Dr Mike Nahan shows that the ACT has allowed spending on public sector wages to get out of control, spending on higher wages rather than greater employee numbers, by not seeking higher productivity outcomes in line with the higher spending.
The most revealing thing was that Dr Nahan was stunned—I emphasise the word “stunned”—by the fact that the ACT government regularly reported deficits of $400 million under the international accounting standards because under those rules they are required to ignore income from land sales and capital gains. What we have here is a government which continually ignores international accounting standards in order to make its budgets look better than they actually are, while blaming the narrow revenue base in the ACT as an excuse for their repetitive budget mismanagement.
I will focus now on a number of my portfolio areas. The first is police. I welcome the addition of 60 police under the 2006-07 budget, because something is better than nothing. But I have serious concerns that this increase falls well short of the numbers required to meet minimum police strengths in the ACT under the national benchmark. ACT Policing needs, as a minimum, an expansion of the existing front-line police strength in the order of 110 to 120 sworn police to bring us into line with the national average. Commissioner Keelty has stated that, as has the AFPA. This expansion needs to occur within two years, no later, given the parlous state of any police presence in our community and the impunity with which young offenders particularly and others carry out crime and harass our community.
It is indeed questionable how much more impact the 60 additional police will make, given the significant attrition rate of ACT Policing and the increasing use of funds to purchase additional overtime to plug gaps left by declining police strengths. Therefore, it is also questionable whether the existing police budget is able to maintain replacements or is being misspent on reactionary overtime expenditure.
Let me illustrate. In the most recent, 2004-05, ACT Policing annual report and in annual report hearings last November it was discerned that ACT Policing’s strength had declined by 35 FTE police on the previous year, sworn and unsworn. In estimates hearings last year, despite the bull the then police minister, John Hargreaves, attempted to spin, we discovered that the number of sworn police officers had declined by 29, from 600 to 571, in the space of one year, and had declined by 25 overall from the 597 sworn officers in 2000-01, the year that Mr Hargreaves and Labor promised to increase police numbers by 120 to the national average.
From the government’s own figures—I refer to fact sheet No 11 for the 2006-07 budget—we now know that seven police were added by this government in 2002-03, 10 in 2004-05 and a further 10 in 2005-06, presumably sworn and unsworn, a total of 27 additional police. On my reckoning, therefore, that means that even with the additional 27 police to date, we are still in decline from the 2000-01 police strength—fantastic!—with a net loss of five police per year over five years of Labor government.
With the 80 additional police to come over the next three years on top of the 27 I have just mentioned—the 80 police that the government claims it is going to add—we will fall
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