Page 3326 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 18 September 1990
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goodness the Alliance Government was in power to ensure that the budget did not blow out as seriously as it was going to.
Ms Follett: We made a surplus, a $24m surplus, on our budget.
MR HUMPHRIES: We made the surplus, Ms Follett, not you. I want to quote from Ms Follett's remarks. She said:
The budget makes it clear that this is a Government which has no strategy for caring for Canberra.
Again, that is very hard to substantiate. First of all - and I am sure Ms Follett recalls this - there was a very detailed budget strategy statement tabled in, I believe, May of this year, setting out how we proposed to deliver the same level of services to the people of Canberra at less cost. In the rhetoric it is completely ignored. She says we need a strategy "which would protect the economic vitality of the ACT and at the same time provide measures to increase, not decrease, social justice".
Economic vitality is a pretty rich term coming off the tongue of Ms Follett. What did she do in government to protect the economic vitality of the ACT? What has she done since going into opposition to support the Government in measures to improve the economic vitality of the ACT? The answer is "absolutely nothing", because her solution, I suspect, to the budget problems is to tax business. The Opposition wants to tax business to the hilt. That is what they would do to make up the shortfall.
Ms Follett smiles sweetly but she knows that is the truth. If you do not tax ordinary people by putting up the rates - and she attacked that suggestion - if you do not cut expenditure - you cannot touch anything in the ACT; you cannot cut jobs; you cannot change the way in which infrastructure is provided; you cannot make any of these changes - then what are you left with? Presumably you tax business to the hilt. So much for the idea of protecting the economic vitality of the ACT. What a rich statement!
She complains about paying through higher taxes for poorer services - again, a matter of some hypocrisy on the part of those opposite. The other interesting thing I noticed in the remarks that she made was her reference to a tax on the private sector. There was nothing about a tax on the public sector. Ms Follett said:
The Government is still hell-bent on attacking the public sector, privatising public services such as health and education and slashing public sector jobs.
I do not think there were many occasions - I can recall only two in fact - when Ms Follett shared a platform with
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