Page 4650 - Week 16 - Tuesday, 27 November 1990
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Mr Berry, I think, said that funding was set under these new arrangements at the whim of government. I have to ask him whether the whim of government is any more objective or less objective a way of setting funding levels for community organisations in Canberra than is the amount of money that Canberrans happen to spend in any one year gambling - the amount of money that they happen to put through poker machines and spend on lotto and Tattslotto and New South Wales and Victorian lotteries and soccer pools. Is that kind of test any more objective a way of working out what we need to be spending on community organisations than the whim of government? It is a considerably less objective method, I would have thought. Is not government better able to assess the needs of community organisations and make a decision about what it is that we need to be doing? I think the answer, very clearly, has to be yes.
The other argument put forward by the Opposition was that we were trading off for gambling in our community; that this was some kind of sop to people for the fact that gambling does occur in our community and that government has taxed gambling in our community. I really wonder, Mr Speaker, whether for anybody involved, either as a gambler or as a person who uses the Community Development Fund type moneys, it really makes a scrap of difference whether there is a direct connection or there is not.
Will they not be aware - I am sure they will be - that gambling money will still be spent for community purposes in the ACT, not directly through a Community Development Fund but through the Consolidated Revenue Fund? That is the reality.
The idea that government is going to stop funding community organisations is just laughable. It really is laughable, not because the Opposition want to get up in this place and say, "We are going to stop you from cutting off funding to community organisations" but because any government which failed to fund community organisations worthy of funding simply would not last. Nobody in this house is deluded on that score.
The fact is that the Community Development Fund was a device in its time for putting funding away from an uninterested government, the Federal Government. It is no longer appropriate. It is not appropriate in any other State in this Commonwealth of which I am aware, and I suggest that it is not appropriate any longer for the ACT either.
To summarise, Mr Speaker, the change in the arrangements for funding community programs will not disadvantage community groups in the ACT. The entitlements to CDF funds committed for programs prior to the end of this year are protected by traditional provisions contained in the Bill we are going to pass tonight. This Government has also
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