Page 1445 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 1 May 1990
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family budget on their capital assets, or do they stop and reconsider the proportions of their spending? Any sensible family would consolidate before spending more on the house.
The ACT budget is, of course, not so simple. However, the principle remains, and we have to ask whether the proportions going into capital and recurrent budgets are appropriate. The Chief Minister would like to think that this budget strategy is a budget of vision, that it takes the long-term view. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This is a budget of medium view. Granted, it does extend beyond the Labor vision of last year, but it does not look to the future. The future is tied up in our health and our education. This medium-vision budget has not protected the long-term needs of our citizens, in particular our children. Donald Horne has recently been trying to take Australians out of the "lucky country" thinking and into a frame of mind that we need to be the "smart country". If the budget strategy that we have before us is implemented, we will rapidly become the "stupid state", or the "stupid Territory". You cannot expect people to see you as having a long-term vision when the financial future is so clearly tied up in brain power and you are putting the scythe through our education institutions, from preschool all the way through to TAFE.
You have a series of possible choices. The first one is to realise that we are fortunate to have had an overspending in capital terms up until now and to reduce the rate at which we are spending on capital items whilst we consolidate, the same as a family would do. In the interim, until our budget gap decreases, as you have suggested on page 8 of your strategy, we could make any of the required cuts primarily from our capital budget.
You have presented the notion that we have been oversupplied with facilities. Now is the time to make genuine, hard decisions - instead of limiting yourself to what your public servants tell you - and protect the long-term hopes and aspirations of the people of the ACT. That is what is required by a hard decision.
The second hard decision you have before you is rethinking the promises that you are in the process of breaking. It is one thing to say, "We did not know how bad a position we would be in and therefore we have to make extensive cuts to the areas of public welfare" - that is in the broad sense - it is another to say at the same time, "We cannot break our promises about raising rates". You, as a group - and I am not just speaking to the Chief Minister - have broken so many of your election undertakings, what is one more of your promises?
It is no good just attempting to take credit for what others have done, as you attempt to do on page 5, with reference to regional roads and deregulation of the airlines. That is not going to fool anyone. I quote:
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