Page 221 - Week 01 - Thursday, 15 February 1990
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will face a $100m financial shock in 17 months' time. He is scaremongering, indeed, in order to implement his extremist agenda. Even if Mr Kaine were correct in saying that adjustment to Grants Commission overfunding is upon us, he is still intentionally distorting his facts. I believe Mr Kaine knows that the Grants Commission did not find that we were simply overspending.
The Grants Commission said that some 40 per cent of their estimated overfunding related to insufficient revenue effort, but this Government, this current Alliance Government, has no intention of looking at the revenue side of the equation. In fact, every major revenue initiative we brought to this Assembly while in government was opposed by the Liberals, every single initiative. We were not going to drag revenue from the pockets of the average Canberra resident, what we were going to do was to make the big businesses in Canberra and the very wealthy pay their share. They have had a free ride in the ACT on the backs of working people and that was going to stop.
Mr Kaine's approach to Government finances is quite clear. He is intent on protecting those wealthy people, supporting tax avoiders and, indeed, through cuts to services, punishing the poor and the needy in our community. This is a heartless Government and a Government intent on destroying the Canberra that we all know. The policies that Mr Kaine is intent on perpetrating in Canberra are very similar, as I have said repeatedly, to those of his mentor, Nick Greiner, in New South Wales. They are destroying New South Wales as well.
What we will see is that quality health care will only be available to the rich, as you close down our public health system by starving it of funds. Community services will be decimated as you implement Mr Collaery's privatisation plan, his private sector welfare. As in New South Wales under the Metherall plan, education in the ACT will become the preserve of those well-off as your funding cuts see the public education system wither on the vine. We have already heard about the TAFE in question time where funding was provided for those courses.
This is what Canberra has to look forward to under the Kaine plan - the public enterprise which exists in our Territory will be destroyed and all that simply in order to pander to his own ideological delusions and to his business mates.
I wonder, Mr Speaker, whether Mr Kaine has considered what his policy of taking $100m from the ACT economy will actually mean, what effect, also, the loss of those 3,000 jobs will mean. On this side of the house we support and encourage the growth of a strong private sector but it remains the fact that public enterprise is still the largest employer in this Territory. The loss of that number of jobs can have no other effect than that of forcing 3,000 of Canberra's youth to leave Canberra in
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