Page 1656 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 29 May 1990
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essential private employment growth and encouraging the continuing economic development of the Australian Capital Territory. We simply cannot become a high tax island within New South Wales and hope to maintain the prosperity of the Territory.
The Territory's problems must, therefore, be overcome principally by reducing the cost of government programs. In this context the Alliance Government views it as most important that we do not respond by making ad hoc cuts. We cannot afford to take a short-sighted view or adopt a traditional across-the-board approach to cutting expenditures. To do so would not address the underlying features causing our budget imbalances and would place at risk the quality of all the public services provided to the ACT community.
What is required is a planned, logical and ongoing commitment to improving the cost-effectiveness of government services, to better target our programs to meet the community's priority needs and to make the best possible use of all the resources available to the ACT Government, including, in particular, the excellent and dedicated staff of the ACT Government Service. What is also required is a government with the commitment and the courage - and we did not have this last year - to make hard decisions and to face up to the need to change the way in which some services are delivered. The Alliance Government has the commitment and, despite the words from the Opposition, it has the courage. We have already set about the task in a rational way by acquiring information about our situation as a basis for decisions that must be made.
Mr Speaker, before I deal with the Priorities Review Board report and the Government's intentions regarding the report I would remind Assembly members of two points. Firstly, I wish to emphasise that I am not presenting a budget today. I am merely amplifying the Government's forward-looking budget strategy which I presented on 29 March in the light of the additions to our knowledge provided by the Priorities Review Board report. Inevitably, of course, we are defining our budgetary restraints more precisely, and some elements of the 1990-91 budget revenues which must take effect from 1 July 1990 are signalled. But the 1990-91 budget itself will not be brought down until September. Questions by the members of the Opposition to find out what is going to be in that budget will be unanswered until September.
As members of the Assembly are aware, the Government has already taken the initial major steps to address the financial difficulties which have been inherited from the Commonwealth. In particular, in connection with the hospitals, we faced up to the health system shambles that the Commonwealth Government left behind when it gave the ACT self-government and which Mr Berry, despite his loud words, did not address. We have a system of three hospitals where 200 high-quality public beds at Calvary
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