There is something seriously wrong when core crime-fighting police services are being cut in preference to other things. It is a matter for the Government to look for cuts in aras outside the police budget and for police to look at less harmful cuts within the police budget. There is no reason why the ACT cannot have police services of the same or better standard than those of other states for the same cost per head.
As the minister responsible, Terry Connolly, has said, Canberra is a safe city. True. Therefore our costs should be lower. Canberra does not have the difficulties of inner city areas of lawlessness to the same degree as Sydney’s Redfern or Melbourne’s inner area. It does not have the tyranny of distance like Western Australia or Queensland. It has a lower crime rate than other states. It is a more middle-class, law-abiding territory than many other places in Australia. Policing should be easier. Moreover, Canberra should have specialist in bureaucratic skills that should enable us to administer things more efficiently.
Apparently not. As soon as the ACT has police budget has problems, the first response is to cut operational areas. It is not good enough.
Naturally, one should treat with some scepticism claims by the Australian Federal Police Association about budgets and there effect on services to the community. No doubt it has community interests at heart, but it has its own members’ interests even closer to its heart; that is what it is there for. None the less if its claims are true it is a matter of profound concern for the people of Canberra. The association says that the budget is facing a $800,000 blow-out. As a result cuts will be made to weekend work by the crime squad (no doubt on the basis that criminals only work public-service hours), a cut to city-beat officers and other cuts to the police presence in the community, including traffic patrols. These are precisely the wrong areas to cut.
Mr Connolly is right to say that the police must run to a budget that is not open-ended. However, one must question whether the bottom line of that budget is right and if it is right whether proposed cuts are in the right places.
At a time of rising crime and growing insecurity by the law-abiding population (as evidenced by a survey late last year by the Australian Institute of Family Studies), the ACT population would probably prefer to see a higher police budget and a lower budget for some other things. Mr Connolly is in a good position to investigate that possibility. He is also responsible for Canberra’ bus service, ACTION. For some time now he has sweated with modest success at making inroads into that bottomless hole of ACTION finances. There has been much talk of part-time and casual drivers, split shifts, tighter timetables and so on. The police budget blow-out is about $800,000 and patching it seems to have a great cost for community policing. The buses, on the other hand, have a government subsidy of more than $50 million. Surely, some priorities are wrong here.
Let’s take some late-night buses off the road and replace them with police cars.