Page 4827 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 1 November 2017
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rates. This is not a request for more money. This is asking the government to keep up with inflation. That is all that has been asked for in this motion.
Mr Rattenbury accused me of interjecting on him where I disagreed with his point. The only point I was disagreeing with—and he is smart enough to know—is that it is not a request for more money; it is asking the government to at least keep up with inflation and also for the government to come back with plans on how they are going to address this issue of shortfall in funding over a period of years. We will not be supporting the amendment.
I think it is also hilarious that the minister’s amendment says that ACT Policing is adequately resourced to ensure that Canberra remains one of the safest places to live. What, compared to Detroit? Mogadishu? Frankly, I think the people of Waramanga only see here a minister standing on his little pedestal fiddling while Waramanga burns, while six-year-olds have to try to put out with the garden hose a fire in their car while their father bleeds to death on the front lawn. It is a disgrace and it is embarrassing.
It is embarrassing that the government should try to amend my motion to say that this is one of the safest places to live. This is clearly not one of the safest places to live. Ask the Chinese community; ask the residents of Kambah, Waramanga and Fisher; ask the residents whose children have been involved in these incidents, whose mothers and fathers have been involved in incidents. This is clearly not the safest place to live in the country even. Sixty-four per cent of women claim to feel unsafe in Woden after dark, and the minister gives no indication of how that is going to be improved. All he does is stand here and say, “No problem here. There’s no problem here. No problems.”
Minister Rattenbury came in here and said, “Oh, well, there is no need for Mrs Jones to ask that policing funding be kept even in line with inflation because there are other calls on the budget.” That is a perfectly ridiculous argument, because of course we should be maintaining baseline police funding across the board. The ACT government has not kept police funding in line with inflation, population or workloads. That is clear.
Minister Rattenbury talked about domestic violence, as the minister for policing did. On domestic violence, obviously we are succeeding in some ways in this space but there is no doubt that each individual call-out of police to a domestic violence incident is taking them longer. That is what the men and women of the police force on the ground are telling me. That is their daily experience. They want to do that work well and it takes longer than previous incidents that they have been involved in.
Funding has only increased by five per cent, while inflation has increased by over eight per cent and the population has gone up by over 11 per cent. The government was constantly telling us in the last election how the population is increasing at such a fast pace—and I acknowledge and am glad to hear that there are a couple of million dollars being spent on a review of where we are going to go in the future with this—but it does not mean that there has not been a historical problem or that there should not be any action taken now.
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