Page 4804 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 1 November 2017
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measures to assist police target serious and organised crime. The government is committed to ensuring that our police have the necessary tools at their disposal to effectively deal with serious and organised crime entities and wherever possible to confiscate their criminal assets and put offenders before the courts.
ACT Policing is clearly a highly effective police force. It is agile and responsive and it works collaboratively with the government to address changes in the crime environment. When assessing funding levels for policing, it is important to look at a range of factors. Those include geographic footprint, urban sprawl, population, and the evolving crime environment, including crime rates and government and community expectations.
In the ACT we also need to consider the arrangements we have with the Australian Federal Police to support ACT Policing, which provide economies of scale and shared or enabling services. When looking at the expenditure per capita in the ACT, we also need to consider that in addition to the appropriation funding provided to ACT Policing, the ACT government owns and provides seven of the 10 facilities that house ACT Policing.
Contrary to Mrs Jones’s claims, the Productivity Commission’s Report on government services is the best place to get a comparative view on how much the ACT spends overall on policing services. The 2017 report shows that ACT expenditure on police services per person in 2015-16 was $427. This is $32 below the national rate of $459. However, it is comparable with Tasmania at $415 per person, South Australia at $431 per person and Victoria $433 per person.
When we look at this over time between 2011-12 and 2013-14, the ACT was above the national rate and, up until 2014-15, above most other states. As part of the range of saving initiatives across the ACT government, from the 2013-14 budget to the 2015-16 budget, for the first time a modest general savings measure of one per cent was applied to the territorial appropriation for ACT Policing. This has slowed the growth in expenditure per capita. However, the ACT remains consistently comparable with other states, apart from WA and NT, which have the highest expenditure per capita and some of the biggest geographical areas to cover.
Performance and community perception are other indicators of adequate funding levels. When we look at the Productivity Commission Report on government services for 2017, ACT Policing performed highly against all perceptions of crime indicators compared to other jurisdictions.
To add to this, ACT Policing consistently performs well against the targets set in the purchase agreement. In 2016-17 it achieved 18 of the 21 performance measures and 14 of the 17 indicators of effectiveness. Two of the three indicators of effectiveness not achieved were within one per cent of the target. The other was a percentage of persons who self-report to driving 10 kilometres per hour or more over the speed limit, which was 4.2 per cent above the national average and is an ongoing challenge for ACT Policing and government.
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