Page 1176 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 22 August 1989
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the knot is tightening somewhere else at the moment, and that will be a problem that I hope the Chief Minister will put her mind to in the budget.
The Chief Minister says she has instituted community consultative meetings. The first meeting was held on 21 June 1989. We will be interested to know what other meetings have been held during this 100-day progression. There are a variety of claims, such as the release of the Canberra heritage study. That was only released under pressure, from my memory. A number of issues were already in the pipeline, to my knowledge, by former officers of the Administration, and I want to place on record the Rally's appreciation to those ACT public servants who largely produced what measures of success this Government had, meagre though they are.
They were matters that were already in the pipeline and were already the thoughts of effective, competent public servants. To claim the credit politically for them is somewhat churlish, in our view. That includes one of the claims of upgrading ACTION services. We all know about those rolling programs. That is being claimed as a 100-day success. We wait to hear what this Government has done about early proposals for the conversion of these buses, particularly the smelly ones, to gas. What real initiatives have been taken there? There has been a gas conversion proposal for months and months and months. So where is the initiative?
Mr Kaine: In 1993.
MR COLLAERY: My colleague Mr Kaine is being generous to the Government. There are other issues such as the construction of a new primary school and preschool in Theodore. That is a matter that is currently before a committee of this Assembly. It seems to be presumptuous of the Government to claim that as a success since that primary school has been identified for construction for several years. If only the press knew how hollow this claim is; if only they knew the cynicism in some of our party offices about these first hundred days! It reminds us of things that we heard during the bicentennial as ships sailed their way to Australia and went up into the Roaring Forties and down into a gale. We are not sure where the next few days will bring this Government, but certainly the establishment of a 24-hour mental health crisis service might be one measure that the Government knows it has to take when it starts to ponder its errors.
The indexation of funds available to the community development fund in recognition of important work done by the community groups is another little pat on the back, another attempt to gain friends out of a meaningless nonsense statement. We all know, as my colleague Mr Kaine said, the meaninglessness of saying "the indexation of funds". We would like to hear what that means because we do not understand it.
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