Page 1459 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 1 May 1990
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Mr Moore: What are you doing to education? That is the most important bloody service of the whole bloody lot.
MR HUMPHRIES: I will come to that in a moment, Mr Moore, if you will just listen and be patient. Mr Wood spoke about the private sector. He claimed that the Alliance Government was sending a negative image to the private sector. "When are you going to send a positive image?", he said. I do not know whom he talks to in this Territory but the people I speak to give me a very different message. The people I speak to in the private sector have said, "Good on you". The most consistent message I have heard from the private sector, not just since the advent of the Alliance Government but for many years, is, "For goodness' sake, do something about runaway government expenditure".
Government expenditure is a problem that we have to face up to here, not because of any ideological reason but because we have less money to get by with than previous governments have had to get by with. That is the overwhelming reality which Mr Wood and Mr Moore ought to listen to very carefully. The private sector I listen to tells me that we are making the right decision. It is saying, "Good on you for getting into this very serious and critical problem".
He has also been very anxious in the course of this debate and previous debates to portray this Government as a divided government. I have to repeat what I have said before: I have been extremely impressed by the degree of cohesion that we have achieved on this side of the chamber. Frankly, it has been quite extraordinary how well we have been able to deal with each other's own respective policy positions in a compatible and sympathetic way and at the same time establish a single stream of government thought and direction.
Mr Wood was the person who made all sorts of claims at the beginning of this Government about how it was headed for ruin; how we were going to be racked by divisions. Where are those divisions? I have not seen them. I have sat in the joint party room and I have sat in the Cabinet and I have not seen those divisions. Those predictions were wrong. Mr Wood has made many wrong predictions. Mr Wood predicted that Mr Stevenson was going to have to buttress this Government. That did not happen. Some members of the Government predicted we were going to have a wholesale sacking of senior public servants. That has not happened either. Mr Wood is predicting we are going to fall apart over section 19. I am confident that we will not. I think that we will see Mr Wood once again eating his words.
I want to come to a point which Mr Wood raised a little while ago about the idea of cutting and how we can claim to be preserving the quality of services in the Territory if we are cutting. There is an assumption in that line of argument which he obviously has not addressed, and that assumption is that, if you cut the amount you are spending
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