Page 346 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 20 February 1990
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The Leader of the Opposition went on to make a number of other points. She said that when the Chief Minister mentioned the potential $100m overfunding of the Territory after June 1991, this was scaremongering. The Leader of the Opposition said:
I think that it is time that the people of Canberra know the truth about your so-called justification for imposing a $100m cost cutting on them. The truth is that you are conning the people of Canberra by distorting the facts. You say that the Grants Commission and the Commonwealth Government have predetermined that we will receive $100m less in funding from June 1991 and, Mr Kaine, you know this is not true.
Let me remind the Leader of the Opposition of the comments made by one of her Labor colleagues, Senator Walsh, the Minister for Finance in the Federal Labor Government, which is now facing the polls, when he said that it is the belief of his Department of Finance that the level of overfunding has now reached $100m. Who is telling the truth? I would put my money on Senator Walsh's reported comments and the analysis of them by the Chief Minister, Mr Kaine. I would put my money on the fact that, given that high-level bureaucracies - and I trust that all the public servants listening will not be offended - often survive the vicissitudes of political office, the Department of Finance is hardly likely to change its view. It will sustain the view that there is a level of overfunding in identifiable Grants Commission terms of $100m now, and that it will be visited upon us when the two-year guarantee period runs out in June 1991. That is a wholly prudent and reasonable observation for the Chief Minister to make. For the leader of the Opposition to describe that as scaremongering is simply not true and plainly incorrect; it is rhetoric. Really, we cannot run this town on ideological rhetoric.
Mr Speaker, there were some other comments, there were references to a process of indiscriminate sackings and the fact that the proposal that we have an inventory of assets is all a leader and a smokescreen to the greinerisation of the Territory. I think we in this chamber have grown used to a certain degree of rhetoric from the Australian Labor Party. It has very often been used by the deputy leader of that party in this house. Now it has moved on to the Leader of the Opposition. The only reasoned debate on that issue came from another member.
Mr Speaker, I looked just a moment ago at the Australian Labor Party's policies for a fairer Canberra. In the 18 entries in the index there is not an entry for finance. I cannot find a clear finance statement in its policies; there is nothing very clear there.
The Leader of the Opposition is on notice that she needs to have ready a very reasoned response to the claims that she
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