Page 3241 - Week 11 - Thursday, 13 September 1990
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It seems to me that, like his Priorities Review Board, the Chief Minister is acting on the basis of ideology rather than fact. Indeed, it is quite clear that the Alliance Government has an agenda of privatising public assets. This is what it is already doing in education and health and this is what it is proposing to do with the Government's trade waste service. If trade waste is an example of how the Government will undertake its privatisation program, then the ACT economy will indeed be in trouble. How can the Government expect to get a proper market price for a business which it says it is going to shut down if it is not sold in six months? It will underprice the assets in order to sell them and the ACT taxpayer will be ripped off yet again. This lazy Government is simply not doing its homework on economic reform.
But nowhere, Mr Speaker, is this lethargy more obvious than in the cynical way it is treating the Canberra community over expenditure reductions. For several months now the Government has been trying to deceive the Canberra community over the savings it expects from school closures. I must commend the efforts of the P and C associations and the Save Our Schools Committee in discrediting the Government's figures. It has not been an easy job for them. After all, the Government's figures have been a moving target. Every time the Government's figures are demolished it simply makes up new ones. Now, in his budget documentation, the Treasurer has reverted to his original and totally discredited figures. As has been clearly spelt out by the ACT Council of Parents and Citizens Associations, the Government's $3m savings figure is overestimated by at least $2m. Its one-off costs are underestimated by around $3m. The Government's total failure to produce convincing figures has now been publicly acknowledged.
We are to have a so-called independent review - I beg your pardon, that should read "audit" - in a desperate attempt to retrieve some credibility for the Government. There will be yet another report. I have accepted for some time that the Government's agenda has been the destruction of our system of public education, not savings. There is no educational, social or budgetary need to close schools. The community opposes the decision, as do we. But the cynicism with which the Government is treating the Canberra community on education does not end with school closures. A superficial reading of the budget papers would suggest that the destruction of the neighbourhood school system is all that this Government has in store for education. The Treasurer makes no mention of the over $2m additional cuts to funding. There will be 71 jobs cut in our public education system next year, but is the Canberra community told how this will be achieved? It is as if this Government is saying to this community: what has it got to do with you?
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