Page 1808 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 May 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Senator McMullan says that we cannot increase taxes and charges. Ms Follett says that we cannot cut services. What she means by that is we cannot reduce expenditure on any services because she claims that, if we reduce expenditure, we must necessarily decrease the quality of services - a pretty debatable assumption. She says that we cannot cut the quality of services or reduce the size of the public service. She constantly complains about our threats to the number of jobs available in our ACT public service.
Where are we left to go? What is the ACT supposed to do? We cannot reduce our expenditure, we cannot raise our revenue and we cannot get any joy from the Federal Government. We are in a bind. What are we supposed to do? Pray? Mr Langmore, the member for Fraser, has a helpful suggestion - - -
Mr Wood: You are supposed to know what you are doing.
MR HUMPHRIES: We are supposed to know what we are doing. That is the advice of Mr Wood. We cannot raise revenue, we cannot reduce expenditure, but if we know what we are doing, somehow it will all sort itself out.
Mr Langmore's advice is for us to reorder our priorities. How? Mr Langmore is not available to comment, so we do not know what the answer is. The Opposition's position is typical of that of any opposition. It is without responsibility. We do not have that luxury in government. We have to make some hard decisions, and that is precisely what we are doing.
MR MOORE (11.12): The question we must ask about school closures is: what are the real goals of this Government? It then becomes quite clear that it has no idea what occurs under the sorts of plans it has in both education and health. There will be a major movement of people from the public to the private sector. That will happen in education. Numbers of people have told me that that is exactly what they will do with their children - move them into the private sector - because at least that way they will have some certainty. The same is true of hospitals. While we are closing a 150-bed hospital because we have got too much hospital space, we are now about to spend $150m on opening another similar sized private hospital - - -
Mr Humphries: No, we are not spending that. It is a private hospital. We do not spend any money on that.
MR MOORE: That is right, but suddenly we find that we are going to need those spaces. They will be provided by the private sector, but we are told we do not need those spaces in the public sector.
Mr Humphries: We are not cutting any public hospital beds to do that.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .