Page 1663 - Week 08 - Thursday, 28 September 1989
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in extra schools, extra roads, extra transport and various other things are now expected to be borne largely by the ACT people with no fair Federal Government responsibility. That is not on.
In addition, the people in the ACT are apparently expected to pay for the use of a number of our services by people in New South Wales, particularly in south-eastern New South Wales, in the educational and medical areas.
A member: That gets covered.
MR STEVENSON: Not in full. I do not feel there has been a fair apportionment in these areas. We are also told that the Grants Commission has covered the responsibilities of the Federal Government. It has not done that. There has not been specific and basic allocation of funds to cover Federal responsibilities. Far too much has been put on the people of the ACT.
Let us have a look at what is going to happen in a few years in Canberra. When the Federal Government funding, the special funding, cuts off or diminishes - and who knows how soon that will be, as the Federal Government has already shown it cannot be trusted with its promises - we will have to either find more money or make drastic cuts. We should not wait until that time. We should take due planning; we should run a surplus budget. There is a far better case to run a surplus budget than a deficit budget.
The money that comes into the ACT will come from two areas basically - obviously the ongoing grants from the Federal Government in the future and also the money produced within the small business sector. We all acknowledge that the small business sector needs to be encouraged, but where is the encouragement of small business in this budget? We need to encourage small business. It is not necessarily that we need to do something for them. Basically it would be an advantage in a lot of cases if we stopped doing things to them and let them produce and get on with creating jobs.
Another area we need to look at is the public service. We need to encourage efficiency, productivity and excellence in the ACT public service. There is no mention in the budget speech of efficiency; there is no mention in the budget speech of performance enhancement. There was a mention of productivity - it was on page 8 - and it talked about a delay in the introduction of productivity savings in high schools and colleges.
I would suggest we pay more attention to using the wonderful resources we have in the ACT public service. Perhaps we then would not need to be so concerned about using consultants. I suggest an award scheme to give financial bonuses for public servants at whatever level so they can be encouraged to make suggestions on how to improve the financial performance of the public
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