Page 3007 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 5 December 1989
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
quarter of the votes cast in the last election, and those who have bleated over recent days in support of Labor's divine right to rule will do well to remember that. No matter what this Government may say or do, it cannot fight against arithmetic.
I want to go through some of the reasons why I believe specifically this Government should go. In opposition I have been the Liberal spokesman, among other things, in the areas of health and education. In that capacity I have closely followed the performance - some would say the antics - of the Ministers responsible for these two fundamentally important areas of government. After seven months of self-government I can only say that very little has been achieved in these areas, and in some cases considerable harm has been done.
I turn, first of all, to education. Mr Wood has said that this debate is not about policies. With respect, it is all about policies. Policies are fundamental to this, and I want to go on to show Mr Wood and others just what this Government has meant to important policy areas in this Territory. It is unfortunate that more time seems to have been spent by Ministers of this Government thumbing through filth files than paying attention to the educational needs of the children of this Territory. In this portfolio we have seen promises broken, power centralised and participation pushed aside. It was the preschools that were first to suffer from a steady series of Labor Party backflips.
The Chief Minister has talked about what she promised to the people of Canberra at the last election. A series of unbroken commitments I think was what she referred to earlier today. She said, "I am implementing everything I told you I would do". Labor promised the people of Canberra that they would abolish the $6 a week preschool fee and would not seek to make up the $700,000 in lost revenue from within the education budget. They said in their policy and I quote, as I have quoted many times before in this house:
Labor is committed to maximising preschool attendance and will abolish the current preschool fee guaranteeing there is no loss to the education budget as a result.
But no sooner was that preschool fee abolished than the Government announced that $900,000 was to be axed from the preschool budget.
If that was not bad enough, a few months later the Government treated the preschool community with appalling contempt. The preschool community was told that schools would close. Naturally, of course, they were upset, but I think by and large they accepted for the most part the necessity for some rationalisation. I might say, incidentally, that closing preschools is an extraordinary
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .