Alexander Marc: Budget Debate 
Alexander Marc: Budget Debate 
[Volume:626;Page:21074] 
MARC ALEXANDER (United Future) 
: 
 I was going to spend my time talking about criminal justice issues. I will spend a little time on that but I want to talk also about tax cuts because I was enraged by the speech from the honourable member Lianne Dalziel. I think she got it absolutely wrong and in fact it is she who should go back and learn what economics is really all about. 
I will begin with policing. There was plenty in this Budget to help policing along but none of it was quite enough. The Budget allocated $45 million for the call centres. That money is much needed but unfortunately it is short-sighted to think that just throwing money at the call centres will somehow magically transform things when the call centres themselves may not actually be the centre of the problem. The problem is that we do not have enough police out there on the beat—out on the street and in squad cars—to effect whatever the call centres request. Having spent some time at a call centre with the Law and Order Committee I can tell the House that the people who work in the call centres work very very hard and are sometimes unfortunately tainted by problems that are not of their own making. Very often the problem is actually the fact that the squad car simply cannot respond adequately to what the call centre requests. I take my hat off to the people who work in the call centres because they do incredible work in sometimes very arduous and strenuous circumstances. 
One of the things we need—and we did not see much about it in the Budget—is more cops. We need at least another 2000 beat cops out on the street being visible and reducing the possibility of crime. But those beat cops alone will not be able do anything unless we adequately support them with decent equipment. We also need the police to articulate what level of policing they can achieve with what level of funding so that real debate can be held outside ministerial control which can often shut down the argument unfairly. We need to see the interaction between the police and the repercussions and consequences of what they do and the court system which catches up—in other words dealing effectively with the 35000 extra cases that have yet to see the inside of a courtroom. It is stupid to expect the police to do it all. We need the whole system to work together to achieve that. And we need more money for the Institute of Environmental Science and Research to help balance the police in terms of capacity. 
I want to spend a bit of time on the tax cuts. Why do we not have tax cuts now at a time when unemployment is down and productivity is up? We are increasingly expected to believe that there ought to be a disconnect between work and reward. It is utter madness. It is one of the reasons why 600 of our brightest and best are leaving the country every single week which is 10 times the rate of Australia. Why? Because they will get better rewards elsewhere. Those are the people who if they stay in this country will help our productivity and will provide goods and services. They are the innovative ones who create opportunities. Yet we are discouraging them by telling them that it is the Government’s job to decide how much money they should earn not the market. The market mechanism is the most efficient way of telling people the value of what they do; the Government should not intervene. 
The Working for Families package is precisely the mechanism by which the Government has undermined the market mechanism. It is fundamentally flawed and wrong. The Government should never be set up in a situation where it determines the value of a person’s contribution to society. Once a Government does that it can use the tax mechanism to shore up political support for the kinds of credits that it can then provide to one group of the public against another in order to try to shore up its own support and its voter bases. It is not for the Government to decide; it is for the market to decide because with the other way round—the present system—Government departments benefit from the windfall rather than those people who created the wealth in the first place. The tax system is the only way that we can properly address how to reward people and their valuable contributions to society—away from the grubby greedy fingers of this Government.