Page 1854 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 May 1990
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Mr Kaine: Like they honoured their obligation to give you the money last year. That is what will happen.
MS FOLLETT: The Commonwealth has clearly acknowledged that there must be a transition, not the catastrophe which Mr Kaine is threatening. There is no particular reason why we should focus on the $100m figure which, I say publicly, was plucked out of the air by Senator Walsh. It is well known that Senator Walsh is no friend of Canberra. That has always been my position.
Mr Jensen: We will agree with that.
MS FOLLETT: I am glad you heard it. Maybe you will believe it. Mr Speaker, I think that we should be quite clear that the closure of schools in Canberra is part of an overall Liberal agenda of dismantling public services and transferring expenditure from the Government to individuals in our community.
If some school closures do save the Government money - a question which is certainly far from clear and which has certainly been far from clarified by the Minister responsible - they will certainly result in a greater expense for parents and others in the community. So what the Government might save - and that is very questionable - is simply picked up by individuals. The same can be said of other false economies made by this Government, such as the closure of the Ainslie Transfer Station and the Royal Canberra Hospital. Again, it is forcing people to spend, out of their own pockets, money which it then classifies as some sort of government savings. That is a nonsense.
The whole exercise is about forcing individuals to pay for things, instead of the Government providing them on an equal basis to everybody in the community. That is what governments are about - the provision of services. I believe that we have now a recipe for an unequal community, in which the wealthiest can pay for the best in the range of services that is available to them and the rest of the community will simply miss out because they cannot afford those services.
Mr Speaker, I think that the current track that the Government is going down, particularly in regard to public education and public health, is a very retrograde step for the ACT. It sets out to destroy some of the things that are the best in the ACT; it sets out to turn from public enterprise to private enterprise the services that should be the business of government; and it is a purely ideological attempt by this Liberal Government, with the full compliance, it now appears, of the Residents Rally, to privatise the whole of the ACT.
I think the most surprising thing about the entire debate is the position of members of the Residents Rally. We now know that they are just Liberals. They have not stood up
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