Page 3261 - Week 11 - Thursday, 13 September 1990
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by the P and C council in questioning the figures in Budget Information Paper No. 3 - the ones that Mr Humphries unsuccessfully tried to debunk last night. I emphasise the word "unsuccessfully".
Mr Humphries: Why was it unsuccessful? What was inaccurate about what I said?
MR MOORE: I shall take you up on that at another time, Mr Humphries. I want to move on to the hospitals. We see in the budget a suggested capital expenditure of $120m to handle the hospitals restructuring program, and the hope is that $8m, give or take a little, will be saved in recurrent expenditures, which seems to be a very worthwhile cause. However, let us use the same methodology that is being used by Treasury as far as schools go and the methodology that was agreed by Dr Perkins. They related capital expenditure to recurrent expenditure. They divided by 9.8, and they had a series of reasons for doing that. I have quite accepted that. If you do that, then the $120m capital divided by 9.8 gives you $12.2m per year that we will be spending. So we will be spending $12.2m a year in recurrent terms in order to save $8m a year. That is really great stuff. In the meantime we wind up having our hospitals closed, against the wishes of the community.
I think, Mr Deputy Speaker, that I will leave it at that point. This budget, which has some quite good and positive aspects that I have referred to, is really after all a very conservative budget designed by a very conservative Liberal Government, and its hangers-on, to support their own Liberal Party support group who are referred to in the advertisement from the paper that I quoted earlier.
MR DUBY (Minister for Finance and Urban Services) (4.15): Mr Deputy Speaker, I think the headline in the Canberra Times of Wednesday, 2 September, said it all. It says, quite categorically, "Kaine's balancing act". I think that is the one thing that we are very satisfied about. There is one thing that the people of the ACT can be very proud of in this first Kaine budget, this first Alliance Government budget, and that is that the budget is balanced. Having listened to comments on all the budgets that have been brought down in other States, I know for a fact that people breathed a collective sigh of relief. They saw the horror budgets brought down in other States where there has been less responsible stewardship of the public purse than has been experienced here in the ACT.
Mr Connolly: Thanks to the good financial position you were left in by Labor.
MR DUBY: When we looked at the books when this Alliance Government took power in January, Mr Connolly, the good responsible management that you mentioned was heading this Territory for a budget deficit of over $40m. If we had not pulled the whole economy around, pulled it up by the bootstraps, we would have been looking at a deficit of over
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