Page 3325 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 18 September 1990
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sectors and the bureaucracies administering those services is fundamental to that process. It is a process of restructuring the way in which we provide services and the allocation of those services. We are, as I said, unlike the Labor Party, taking some hard decisions.
The alternative, of course, if one rejects all the revenue raising measures the Government has put forward, and if one rejects all the expenditure reducing alternatives the Government has put forward, is to borrow and to sink further into debt. Perhaps those opposite would like us to go the same way as governments elsewhere in this country have gone; for example, the Government in Victoria.
In Victoria the Premier, Mrs Kirner, who is an ideological fellow traveller with Ms Follett, has slashed 3,600 jobs from education, including 1,620 secondary teaching jobs. She has increased class sizes - a matter of great importance to people in the ACT, a matter of great importance to those opposite, to the Socialist Left presumably - and she has cut 1,500 jobs in the health sector in Victoria. Yet still Victoria is left with a deficit of some $660m.
I think, Mr Speaker, those opposite know, in their heart of hearts, that if this Government does not take steps like this, like the steps that it has taken, the only alternative is the sorts of steps that those opposite have pretended they do not wish to adopt but which they know their colleagues in Victoria have adopted. Of course, we do not have a State Bank to sell. We have not the same assets, the assets of the people of the ACT, that we are prepared to throw out with the bath water. We know what is important. We know that good governments administer well. We know that good governments have to make sure that they deliver services in a more cost-effective manner, and that is what we are all about.
As I said, I have gone through the speech Ms Follett made last Thursday and examined the comments she has made and I repeat that I think these comments are attacking the image of the budget rather than the substance. I note that Ms Follett was at some loss at the beginning to actually identify what she wanted to say about this budget. She started off by saying that it was too hard on the people of Canberra; the budget was a tough one; it was unnecessarily harsh. No doubt she picked up the Canberra Times the next day. Its criticism came from precisely the opposite direction. It said that we had not taken enough of the hard decisions. Ms Follett's language changed then to, "This is a lazy Government; this is a lazy budget produced by a lazy Government", and yet she knows in her heart of hearts that hard decisions have to be taken. I refuse to accept a single word of criticism put forward by those opposite unless and until they spell out their vision and unless and until they spell out what they would do in the same circumstances. They were in government for seven months and they could barely balance the budget. Thank
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