Page 3242 - Week 11 - Thursday, 13 September 1990
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Mr Speaker, I turn now to the Treasurer's announcement that he will make a $2m, or 5 per cent, cut to TAFE. In real terms it appears to be a cut of some 10 per cent. I accept the Treasurer's statement that this is an area where the Grants Commission assessed significant overfunding. I also know, however, that technical and further education is a crucial part of our future economic development and we should also acknowledge TAFE's clear role in this international literacy year. It is important that we increase the level of training in our community, not reduce it.
Mr Speaker, I would have liked now to comment on the appropriateness of the savings targeted for the TAFE system, but this is simply not possible. The Government is hiding its proposals from the people of Canberra. The most detailed statement about how this 10 per cent cut will be achieved is in budget paper No. 5 and I will quote:
These savings are reflected across the recurrent expenditure of the TAFE.
This is less than fulsome, I would suggest. It does appear that half of these cuts are going to be achieved by running down reserves, but you have to ask: what happens next year when even larger cuts are foreshadowed?
Public housing has also been attacked in this Alliance budget. The allocation of $36m to public housing is a reduction of some 32 per cent from the allocation made in our budget last year. This is a reduction in the public housing construction program of some 100 houses, and confirms the fact that this Government has no commitment to public housing and to social justice.
We must, of course, examine the continuing disaster of this Government's hospital redevelopment plans. These plans have been comprehensively rejected by the community as an attack on our public health system. The Government's plans have already shut public hospital beds, increased waiting lists for surgery and added to the costs of health services in the ACT. All of this destruction has taken place for a nebulous promise of future savings.
This is the same sort of poorly costed promise as we have seen in the school closures debate. In reality, the Alliance hospital restructuring program is no more than a thinly veiled attack on the public health system. This year alone we are seeing a reduction in public hospital expenditure in the order of 10 per cent. Up to 300 jobs can be expected to be lost in our health system as a result of this budget. These include the massive job losses which will result from the Jindalee decision. The haste to complete this project has meant huge increases - increases not spelt out either by the Minister for Health or by the Treasurer.
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