Page 1856 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 May 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
about non-government services and the way in which the Government is proceeding. Particularly, it is worth drawing to the attention of the Assembly how much Ms Follett's views are out of tune with those of the rest of the community. Ms Follett claims that we, on this side of the chamber, are isolated, locked up and not in touch with what people are saying. Mr Moore also, I know, claims frequently to speak for the community, saying "the community believes this" and "the community believes that". I have been to a number of public meetings now, talking about school closures, and I have posed the question: what should the Government be doing to find money to avoid having to cut more deeply into education? On almost every occasion - I am sure Mr Moore will bear this out - the answer has been, "We should be looking at the size of the ACT bureaucracy". They constantly point to particularly the number of people in the Department of Education but generally the number of people in the ACT public service.
Mr Moore: As one of the solutions they expect you to be competent to work out your priorities.
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Moore will be well aware of views of the public on this matter and how strongly people feel that we should be cutting back on unnecessary bureaucracy before we start to cut back on services. What Mr Moore and Ms Follett do not seem to realise in their attacks on processes such as the Priorities Review Board is that issues of the kind that those people in the community are talking about are addressed in those documents. They address the way in which the Government is tackling issues of overmanning and overstaffing and ways in which it might provide services better to the community of Canberra. In my view, that is what the Priorities Review Board has been all about - delivering better services at less cost to the ACT taxpayer. (Quorum formed)
I know that Mr Berry must find some of these comments very painful, and he must be embarrassed and humiliated by having these home truths rammed forcefully to his attention, but I hope that he will endure the embarrassment in the absence of his colleagues.
Mr Speaker, before the interruption I was talking about the way in which the public service is perceived by many in the ACT community to be the first port of call of any government that wishes to reduce the cost of providing services to the ACT. It is obviously the perception of many people in the community - not one shared by the Opposition - that governments are able, in those cases, to trim the cost of providing government services without necessarily reducing the services themselves.
That is what measures of the kind we have spoken about in the last two days are all about, yet that is not what the Opposition seems to understand, because it is possible to reduce the cost of government without necessarily reducing the services made available by that Government. That is a
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .