Page 225 - Week 01 - Thursday, 15 February 1990
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provide an acceptable level of government services at least cost to the users.
Since taking government we have established an expert committee to advise us on the appropriate priorities for making the significant adjustments required in the ACT. This is aimed at taking the ACT out of the potentially disastrous situation of facing, unprepared, a major shortfall in its funding. It will be unprepared because the Labor Government did nothing. This Government will meet that challenge with a planned and considered approach, rather than nibbling at the edges as the Labor Government attempted to do.
In my first address to the Assembly as Chief Minister I undertook to develop a comprehensive five-year plan which would clearly spell out to the community the Government's priorities and intentions. That will be done. Consistent with this we will negotiate with the Commonwealth Government to maintain its level of support for the ACT, not for the remaining one year but for five years. If the Opposition is to raise criticisms, it should address those criticisms to the past administrators of the ACT, namely, the Commonwealth Government, not this one; it has only been here for two months. My Government will press home to the Commonwealth that it should accept financial responsibility for its decisions affecting the ACT and for the continuing impact of the national capital on the ACT's finances.
A third positive action of the Government will be to give strong support to the inquiry into assets and public debt transferred to the ACT upon self-government. I note that the Leader of the Opposition said that we instituted that inquiry. I have to correct that. It was instituted by her. I know she did it reluctantly on my motion in the Assembly, but she, in fact, instituted that inquiry. This inquiry will provide an understanding of what we owe and what we own. It is fundamental to any successful management of a major financial organisation that the balance sheet is clearly understood. It is not good enough to take an ad hoc approach to decision making on matters of fundamental importance to the well-being of the community. The burden of the public debt arising from these assets needs to be quantified and understood, but again, your Government, Mr Berry and Mrs Grassby - since the Leader of the Opposition is not here - did nothing but merely respond to my initiative from the Opposition to get this inquiry going.
As the Assembly will recall, this inquiry came into being as a consequence of a motion which I initiated and which required the Labor Government to take seriously its management of the finances of the ACT community, something that it had not done up until that point. It is composed of three highly regarded members of this community. With their analysis and advice we shall, at last, have a consistent basis for future financial planning - something that the Labor Government did not even begin to comprehend.
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