Page 1665 - Week 08 - Thursday, 28 September 1989
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this retreat, much of this backdown on the part of the Government, was pre-planned; that the cuts being made were very specific; that they were intended in many respects to be reversed; that the Government knew perfectly well that there would be public outcry in certain areas and that it was only going to gauge the depth and the strength of that public outcry before deciding to implement its plan to reverse those particular cuts. Which of course leads us inevitably to the view that the Government was not really listening very hard during the budget consultative process; it was not really trying to determine what people thought. It was merely trying to see whether its predictions about public reaction to its cuts would be borne out. And of course they were.
This raises questions about what happens in future years when this kind of practice is followed, should we be unfortunate enough to be inflicted with a Labor government in future years; what happens when we follow the practice of seeing how loudly particular groups cry out before cuts to the proposed areas are to be reversed. The message is very clear, and I think a commentator made a point the other day: if your area is to be cut and you are invited to make a submission to the budget consultative process, call out long and hard and often and your cuts will get reversed. That is, of course, assuming that they had been planned to be implemented by the Government. But, for goodness sake, do not lose the opportunity because it might have been scheduled to happen and if you do not cry out loudly enough you might miss out.
The other thing to say about those so-called reversals is that the public should not be hoodwinked into thinking that cuts to these key areas have been in fact fully reversed by the Labor Government - not by a long shot. Education cuts proposed in this budget are still substantial. The Government had proposed cuts of almost $3m this year and almost $5m in a full financial year. The cuts now total some $3.6m in a full year, still very substantial. Concessions announced in the budget total just $635,000 in this area. People in education must remember that Labor is still proceeding with the bulk of its cuts, particularly in the area of preschools.
Expenditure on community services and health, on the other hand, will increase in actual terms by just 3.2 per cent. That represents a substantial decrease in real terms. Now, the most galling part of this whole process is not so much that the cuts themselves are occurring, hard as that may be; what is galling about it is that during the election campaign in the early part of this year the ALP, to put it bluntly, fibbed about the extent of its proposed budget cuts and fibbed about the extent to which it would reduce services to the people of the ACT.
It said, often and loudly, "Trust us. We're the Labor Party. We won't cut your services. We won't reduce the quality or the quantity of services which we are currently
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