Page 1822 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 May 1990
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under the waterline - is that education must be quarantined from the budget. I want to make one thing clear. I am also the welfare and community services Minister. How do you think I feel and how do you think my community services people and the welfare carers feel about those statements?
There are no empty places in any of the welfare programs that I administer; there is nothing but stress and strain, misery and disadvantage. Yet we have a Labor Party committing itself in a serious budget problem to preferential treatment to one sector of the community. I will come back to that, in terms of the irony of their image on social justice, as they call it.
Certainly, I have been with a lot of dedicated carers and community groups recently. They are not up in arms at the moment but they will be if this Labor Party continues to fail to speak to that silent, undemonstrative population in the ACT: the disabled, the dying and the destitute who are being totally ignored. Not one of the ALP speakers today has mentioned the disadvantaged schools. Not one of you has mentioned the after-school care system. Not one of you spoke of anything but your comfortable little bourgeois precepts that you have developed in this town. There is more social justice on this side of the floor than you will ever have, and I will tell you where that is coming from. You are going to learn up to 1992 that we can carry your program miles further than you could ever carry it. We will do it better and we will have a shaped budget as well. Come on, take your medicine - - -
Ms Follett: And more criminal justice too!
Mr Berry: Yes, 25 per cent of your Cabinet are crooks and 20 per cent of your Government are crooks.
MR COLLAERY: Mr Speaker, make him stand up if he has got a point.
MR SPEAKER: Order! I will ask for a withdrawal of that, please, Mr Berry.
Mr Berry: I withdraw.
MR COLLAERY: Mr Speaker, the people on this side of the house have very strong convictions. We sure do and we are going to see them through. You aberrant ALP types who have drifted off from the Labor stream in this country will get a big serve in the next two years. You will learn that we can reply to the Burdekin report, we can provide youth housing initiatives, we can set up youth advisory ministerial committees, we can create a schools council, we can get rid of all your collectivisation and Marxist ideas. We will do so. They will be dismantled.
Ms Follett: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.
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