Page 4647 - Week 16 - Tuesday, 27 November 1990
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MR HUMPHRIES (Minister for Health, Education and the Arts) (9.43): Mr Speaker, we have heard a great deal of reverential rubbish spoken this evening about the Community Development Fund. I think it is appropriate for us to peel this away and see what it is that the Community Development Fund in fact has been about over the last few years. The facts are very different from what the Opposition has put forward tonight. I have to say that the tone in which they have spoken of the CDF has been very different from the tone in which many others in our community have spoken about the CDF over the last few years. In fact I recall fewer topics in the pre-self-government period which attracted more controversy and more debate than the nature of the CDF and the allocations from the CDF in any given year. So I think that there is a certain nostalgia already creeping into the discussion on the CDF which is not appropriate to the reality of what the CDF has been.
The first thing we should note about the CDF is that it is not nearly as venerable an institution as people opposite seem to pretend. Mr Wood spoke about the tradition of arm's-length funding. It is worth reminding people that the CDF was established only nine years ago - hardly a tradition over nine years. I remind members that there was funding of community groups in the ACT long before the Community Development Fund was established, and there will continue to be funding of community groups in the ACT long after the Community Development Fund is abolished. So we do not need to pretend that this is somehow the be all and end all of community funding of organisations. The fact also is that there are, to my knowledge, few, if any, other States that use this kind of mechanism for funding organisations of the kind that we fund through our CDF. Why is it that we need the CDF in the ACT when other self-governing polities in this country get by without it? The fact is that we do not.
Mr Speaker, I also want to correct a false statement made by Mr Wood. He referred to accepting the advice of organisations and bodies that offer advice to the Government on the funding of organisations, previously through the CDF, now under new auspices. Mr Wood's claim was that the idea of arm's-length funding necessitated some mechanism for having such organisations to advise the Government and, as a result, governments necessarily had to accept the advice of those organisations. That is a fairly high-minded principle; one which he suggests to us we ought to follow and, by implication too, in the case of the Arts Development Board, that I, as Minister for the Arts, ought to follow and accept in total recommendations made by the Arts Development Board.
But the recommendation rings fairly hollow in my ears, given the fact that previous Labor governments - I think the Follett Government was in this category - have rejected or modified advice received from the Arts Development Board and similar bodies. I do not think Ms Follett would rise in this place to say that she accepted everything that was
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