Page 3335 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 18 September 1990
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But, Mr Deputy Speaker, the most extraordinary aspect of this is that the Government continues to attempt to justify this on the basis of social justice. The Government has appropriated this term, social justice, and claims that it is supportive of this concept.
Well, we saw this afternoon just what they understand by social justice. At a time when the public schools in this town are being closed down and sold off to developers, you are giving Canberra Girls Grammar School a large block of land for a hockey field. Social justice! That is your understanding of social justice. If your social standing is right, you just help yourself to community assets. That is their understanding of social justice. It sums up this Government in one action. And the extraordinary thing is they do not even seem to think that there is anything unusual about that decision. The community will judge you harshly on that decision because it encapsulates your contempt for the community and your priorities.
Those parents of children at the public schools that are being closed, who are being told "We have to close down your school and thus affect your education" and, in the case of the therapy centres and the hearing impaired unit, affect the very health and well-being and livelihood of these young people, are being told "We have to do that because of budgetary imperatives", and at the same time you are giving away a prime piece of real estate to Canberra Church of England Girls Grammar School. Well, I will leave it to the community to judge your sense of social justice and priorities.
Turning to the particular aspects of the portfolio area that I shadow, Mr Collaery on one view could go down as a very historic Attorney-General. There are a number of reasons for that. Ms Follett, in her amusement, no doubt is thinking of them. The conventional way of approaching an ongoing budget is to look at this year's expenditure as compared to last year's expenditure and decide whether Ministers have been successful in increasing their access to resources and their application of those resources to community needs - and we are usually looking at a few percentage points one way or the other as a measure of success or failure. Certainly it is conventional for Ministers themselves to judge their success by the extent to which they have been able to increase their access to and application of community resources.
On this view I am left with the perplexing problem that Mr Collaery is in one sense the most successful Attorney-General in history in that his law and order share of the resources of the Territory budget has gone from 2.34 per cent in 1989-90 to 8.28 per cent in 1990-91 - an increase of 254 per cent - which few Ministers in any jurisdiction have been able to match. Of course, it is difficult to look at these figures and make any sense of them in terms of the Government stewardship of issues of law, justice and - - -
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