Police Recruitment

Mr TELFER (Flinders) (14:39): My question is to the Premier. How will the Premier recruit police officers when they cannot afford to live in Adelaide? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr TELFER: In the Property Council's report Beyond Reach, it was found that a police officer's single-income household is effectively locked out of buying a median-priced house or unit in all locations surveyed.

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee—Treasurer, Minister for Defence and Space Industries, Minister for Police) (14:39): I thank the member for Flinders for his question because, as members in the chamber would be aware, the government is investing significant additional resources to help police recruit more sworn officers to protect South Australians across our communities.

Not only have we provided more funding for recruitment efforts, in particular an initiative to increase recruitment and to better publicise the number of positions available in South Australia Police including re-establishing a program that was run under a previous Labor government to recruit sworn officers from overseas including from the UK and Ireland that is proving successful, but we are catching up on the deficit in sworn officer numbers that was left to us by those opposite.

In addition to that, in the last couple of months the government has reached agreement with police to substantially increase their rates of pay. There has been a substantial increase in pay rates across all sworn officer levels and ranks, which is putting not only more money in the pockets of police officers right now but continuing to do so each and every pay. On top of that, there are, of course, the measures that the Minister for Planning has just been informing the house of—a comprehensive series of initiatives to increase housing supply across the board. It is only by increasing housing supply that we will take some of the sharper edges off the housing pressures that are being felt by the entire Australian community at the moment.

Coming out of COVID, for example, where we had a former Coalition federal government commit more than half a trillion dollars of economic stimulus into the Australian economy in an 18-month period, the sum equivalent to an entire additional commonwealth budget, that has seen rates of inflation surge across the economy and the Reserve Bank increase interest rates. Fortunately, over the last three years inflation is now down towards an area where the Reserve Bank can see fit not only to pause interest rates but indeed to reduce them at their last board meeting.

So this government is taking the actions necessary to release more land, to build more houses, to recruit more police officers and to increase their wages to make sure that not only can we increase the number of sworn officers on the beat but we can also make sure that police officers, like other working South Australians, are placed in a better position to afford their own housing than what they would have otherwise been able to if it had been left to the previous Liberal government and the policies they saw fit either to not carry forward to ease the housing pressures or, of course, to massively increase the tax burden on property owners with their unannounced land tax increases.

I know it's a sensitive issue for the Leader of the Opposition. He was, of course, not able to raise his voice in opposition to those measures undertaken by the former Premier, Steven Marshall, or the former Treasurer, Rob Lucas, but now we are reaping the harvest of those policy decisions taken by the previous Liberal government.