Page 3343 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 18 September 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
MR KAINE: Nearly three minutes has gone by so far, Mr Speaker, and I have not had a chance to say anything yet. I hope they are going to give me an opportunity to reply, because, if they do not, I am going to seek an extension of time to make up for it.
Mrs Grassby: That is all right; we will let you have it; you can talk all night.
MR KAINE: If you would stop chattering now, I could get on with my reply.
Mr Berry: Do not take any notice of them, Trevor; they are just trying to get at you.
MR KAINE: I am not taking any notice of you, because you have not said anything useful yet, and I do not expect you to now.
Mr Speaker, one of the things that have been said in response to the budget is that it does not present any sort of a strategy. I do not know what the people on the Opposition side were doing when I presented the budget, but I went to great lengths to explain the basis of the budget and the strategy that was envisaged in it. I explained the fact that it was not only a budget for this year, but a budget for the first year of at least a three-year budgetary cycle, a budgetary process, to deal with the fundamental questions that are raised by the transition to self-government; and yet the Opposition keeps popping up and saying, "There was not any strategy in this budget". Well, I can say, Mr Speaker, that there was a great deal more strategy in this budget than there was in the last budget, which totally failed to address the question that there were fundamental issues that needed to be addressed. I find it quite astonishing that the Opposition, and particularly the Leader of the Opposition, should say that there was no strategy implication in the budget.
I repeat, Mr Speaker, that I spelled out at great length, first of all, the Government's budgetary strategy; secondly, the Government's budgetary objectives - they are all stated in my speech; and, thirdly, what the Government is doing this year to get the ACT on to a firm financial basis. I can assure the members of the Assembly and the public that the framework and the basis that we establish this year will be built on next year, and I would dispel right now the illusion that next year's budget is somehow going to be an easy budget, because it is next year that the Commonwealth withdraws the additional finances. We will really have to confront the budgetary issues then.
The best that the Leader of the Opposition could do was to accuse the Government of being lazy. Coming from the Opposition, I find that absolutely astonishing, because the only lazy person in this house is the Leader of the Opposition. She spends virtually no time on the floor of
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .