Page 709 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 12 March 1991
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time as Treasurer, and, of course, it will be changed during my time as Treasurer when there is justification and good reason for doing so. The objective of a budget is to implement government policies. They are budget estimates. That is exactly what they are. For anybody to assert that they are fixed figures that are set in concrete and cannot be changed indicates either that you do not understand the budget process or that you do not want to understand. I do not know which. But the question is another one of the series of absurdities coming out of the Opposition in terms of budget control.
School Closures
MS FOLLETT: My question is to Mr Humphries. Mr Humphries, I refer to your admission that the savings from school closures will be only a quarter of your initial overestimate. Will you now accept the view which the Canberra community has put all along, that school closures do not produce significant savings?
MR HUMPHRIES: No, Mr Speaker, I will not accept either that that is the Canberra community's view or that that is in fact exactly what I said. I said that the savings in this financial year would be diminished by the order of up to $650,000, resulting in a total saving of something like $200,000 in this financial year. However, as a result of the Hudson inquiry, the revised figure for annual savings through the schools closure program is about $2.5m. That figure stands. I am quite confident, Mr Speaker, that that figure can be achieved and will be achieved when the full program is implemented.
I obviously regret the fact that in this financial year, as the Chief Minister mentioned earlier, irresponsible actions by members of the community have left the Government without the capacity to make those savings, and in turn left the community without education resources which would otherwise have flowed to the community. Because of those actions we are not able to make that full measure of budget savings. That is not a matter that I have any apologies to make about. It is a matter which those who have caused those losses to the community ought to be ashamed about.
Mr Moore: You caused it. What a reversal.
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, I reject the allegation that I am somehow responsible for the fact that people have unreasonably locked up resources in the Cook school, have refused to hand them over for the use of their own children who are currently in classes at the Macquarie school. That does not help their cause one iota and it certainly damages the educational future of their own children. Yet they blame the Government because it has had to go and buy those additional resources to the value of $45,000. I am not going to apologise for that, Mr Speaker. Other people have that matter on their conscience, not me.
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