Page 4636 - Week 16 - Tuesday, 27 November 1990
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Will the Government give a commitment to retain the Community Development Fund; if so, at what level of funding?
This is where they started to dodge the issue, Mr Speaker. The Chief Minister's answer was:
The future method and level of funding community organisations is being addressed in the 1990-91 Budget.
We know that at that point they had not talked with the community groups, because of our contact with them. This is where the cover-up started.
The next time it turned up was in the Minister's budget speech where he talked about the Community Development Fund, and he said:
However, the Government guarantees that total community grants will be maintained in real terms for two years so that no category of users assisted by the fund will be disadvantaged.
And he said, "Did you hear that, Mr Berry?". Well, I did.
Mr Kaine: And we are still saying it.
MR BERRY: And you are still trying to cover up the facts, because it is not factual. You based it on a cover-up of the levels of expenditure that existed under the Follett Labor Government - very generous expenditure for the Community Development Fund as well. All we have to do is have a look at some of the figures to demonstrate how this Government is going to spend, as it puts it, money on a number of worthy initiatives which might not otherwise have been funded. It seems to me that what the Government is trying to do is to, as they put it, "free up" CDF revenues for allocation to a wider range of community purposes.
Basically, that is what it wants to do: to lock it away from access to the community groups. They are a wake-up to you. Let us have a look at some of the figures. In the Chief Minister's portfolio the 1989-90 expenditure estimate was $290,000. What was spent? $266,000. Was the judgment to maintain funding at the same level based on the $266,000 or the $290,000, Chief Minister? I will back it in that it was on the $266,000 and the figures demonstrate that.
The estimate was $15.007m for Mr Collaery's Community Services portfolio. The actual expenditure for that year was $12.9m. That will be the guaranteed rate for the future. It is demonstrated throughout these figures that the Government has tended to cover up what it intends to do
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