Page 1475 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 1 May 1990
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from! That is where you were with the hospitals, Mr Berry. You were prepared to commit yourself to $216m to refurbish the hospitals when you had not the faintest idea where the money could come from or where it could conceivably come from. You were not prepared to take the hard decisions that had to be made. You thought you could get away with it by taking the easy route. Well, you could not and you will not.
Mr Speaker, there was some comment about my strategy being only a medium-term strategy. This medium-term strategy - and we are talking about a three to five-year period - will merge under this Alliance Government into a longer-term policy, have no doubts about it. Ms Follett stated earlier that we would not be here very long. Well, I have got news for her. She will be holding her breath for a long time before she takes the Chief Ministership again.
By comparison, Mr Speaker, when the Opposition was in government they could not even address a short-term period of up to two years. They could not get past year one. They produced a bad budget for year one and they did not even think about what was going to happen beyond the end of that budget year. Of course, they screwed up this current year's budget badly anyway, and they talk about deceiving the public. We have even discovered that $142,000 that the former Chief Minister claims she put in there for a second women's refuge does not exist. It is a phantom $142,000. She was going to build a phantom refuge, presumably. She sold the budget including the $142,000 figure for this refuge. The $142,000 never existed.
Mr Speaker, there was some discussion about section 19, the Canberra Times site and all of that sort of thing, and the fact that the business community is not very happy with us. Well, those are not the vibes that I am getting from the business community. The point is that we have to come up with a long-term, cohesive planning system, which again the Opposition could not produce in its term of office. It was another one of the hard decisions it just kept putting off. We faced up to it. We have got the planning legislation on the table and we will deal within the context of that planning legislation. We will deal with section 19 and we will deal with the Canberra Times site, and the business community will know where they stand, which is more than you could ever say about the members opposite when they were in government. They had not the faintest idea where they were going. It is very easy to be a knocker but we are getting on with the job and we are delivering the goods.
In conclusion, Mr Speaker, the forward estimates show that there is a $37m shortfall in our budget for next year, and I point out that this is no more than a simple projection of Ms Follett's current budget. We have done nothing to change that. It is just a projection of Ms Follett's budget. These figures do not include any new initiatives which this Government would wish to implement. In other
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