Page 1449 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 1 May 1990
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In the medium term you will also have to come to grips with TAFE. We cannot be the smart state and withstand cutting our TAFE. The words of doom hang out on page 15:
These will include rationalisation of TAFE's school structure and campus consolidation. Course offerings will be reviewed in line with demand, as occurred in 1990. And TAFE will be reviewing its relationship with other training and education entities, particularly in light of the now very high retention rates in years 11 and 12 in our colleges.
How long is it going to be before TAFE is consumed by the colleges? The question is not whether TAFE will be swallowed by the schools and universities but when, if you pursue this suicidal policy.
On the positive side, your suggestion for the development of west Belconnen appears excellent. Will you consult with the people of Aranda, Weetangera, Hawker or Cook about the advantages and disadvantages to them? Using the current infrastructure to delay the development of Gungahlin is clearly a way of using the capital infrastructure that we already have in place. I am sorry, Mr Collaery, if you cannot understand what is going on, but I recognise your difficulty with financial factors. I have seen it before.
With the electricity authority, it is time to look carefully at all the ramifications of a "pay as you use" system. With ACTION, when workers are paid for the hours they work, when you make that decision, then you will be making a hard decision and removing one of our concrete shoes. In conclusion, look to raising revenue, spend more than you currently plan on recurrent expenditure and less on your capital outlay.
MR COLLAERY (Attorney-General) (8.32): The punch line in the Leader of the Opposition's response to the budget statement was "a thinly veiled ideological attack on the public sector" and "the Alliance is, in fact, an ultra-conservative, capital 'L' Liberal Government".
Now, that is the sort of extremism that launched the Leader of the Opposition into her debate on the budget strategy. She did not seek to analyse the strategy itself. There then followed a long ideological discussion, in a vein that we have become used to, about the budget strategy. Those of us who were part of the original so-called budget consultative session with this former Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett, clearly remember all those sessions until the very last morning, when the Chief Minister and I decided that the farce could no longer continue. We decided that this putative Chief Minister knew nothing about budgeting, knew very little about government, and this was an amateurish charade which was going to pull the Territory down to the dimensions that now clearly become evident.
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