Page 233 - Week 01 - Thursday, 15 February 1990
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this Government has, so that people who read Hansard can see what excellent policies they are.
This Government will negotiate with the Commonwealth for an extension of the transition period during which Commonwealth input to the Territory will be maintained. We will review all the revenue and cost elements of the municipal section of the ACT budget annually to ensure the costs of running the city and the consequential rates are kept to a minimum. We will examine, with a view to transferring to private enterprise, those functions where substantial cost savings to the community can be achieved. We will review the organisational and financial arrangements inherited from the Commonwealth. We will conduct continuing negotiations with the Commonwealth to define the nature and degree of Commonwealth responsibility for the costs, direct and indirect, of establishing the national capital.
There are a whole range of other issues. I have another 20 or so here that I can list, one of which is a very interesting one. It is the development of a five-year rolling financial plan from which annual budgets will be derived. All those points merely go to show that the raising of this matter of a public importance - if it is directed to this Government - is a sham.
MR BERRY (4.10): I am pleased that misrepresentation has become the focus of this debate because the Government clearly owns the term. I think Mr Duby is the greatest example of misrepresentation that this Assembly is likely to see.
Mrs Grassby: He will sell out to anybody.
MR BERRY: There is no doubt about that. This Government, which has only been in power for two and a half months, nearly three months, has already made its intentions clear. The most important of these intentions is that one which will lead to the dumping - the scrapping - of 3,000 workers from the public sector in the ACT. The decision has already been made - Mr Kaine clearly accepts this - and now they have decided to pour $300,000 into an investigation which will help to legitimise the scandalous decision that has already been made. As has been appropriately said by the former Chief Minister, the Government will allow this city to run down. It will hit at the service end. That is the ideological position of this Government, it will hit at the service end and it will look to privatising the profitable bits of public enterprise to ensure that their mates are looked after. Of course, the public sector will then be left with the unprofitable areas which will run down further and further and services will decline for the people of the ACT. This will be borne by those in the bottom end of the socioeconomic scale.
Members interjected.
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