Peter Costello (Higgins, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The question is one of the location of family relationship centres and why they are in one place and not another. Here is my answer: why didn’t we just leave the family relationship centres in all the places where the Labor Party had placed them between 1983 and 1996? There weren’t any! There was not a single family relationship centre in a single electorate between 1983 and 1996. Here we have the Labor Party saying: ‘You’ve introduced 65; there aren’t enough around Australia. Look at our record: we had none’! The opposition gets worse by the minute.

Let me go to the question of Aboriginal disadvantage. As the Minister for FaCSIA said a moment ago, when you are dealing with crime of the levels that you are in Aboriginal communities, family relationship centres, which deal with marital breakdown, are not the front-line services that you need. The front-line services that you need are a police force that is capable of apprehending those who are engaged in crime, a court system that will try them and a jail system that will punish them.

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