Page 1030 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 19 March 1991
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particularly behaviourally disturbed young people. A house had to be provided and a 24-hour shift organised to care for two youngsters who could not be allowed into other programs. I will not raise any privacy issues, but I am certain that one of those instances is well known to members in this house.
Those issues do expand a budget. They cannot be anticipated. When you have trimmed your sails in the way that we have had to - thanks to the Commonwealth Government - you cannot make floating provision for exigencies of that order. Mr Speaker, there is no fire in our command capsule. We are in control. The Labor Party continues to grasp at straws and to go around like Dennis Stevenson. There is a great parallel developing there, with the tactics of the Labor Party around town at the moment. There is the scaremongering and the trick reports. Even the media have given up swallowing some of those stories.
The other point that I wanted to make was to refer to page 123, notation (d), of the forward estimates report. I say this particularly for Mr Berry's benefit. You can see that there is an anticipation of extra expenditure occurring in the corrective services area. I will read it into the Hansard:
Expected client growth -
which is a delightful euphemism, as I am sure members will agree -
in adult corrective services will result in additional expenditure of $301,000 in 1991-92, $656,000 in 1992-93 and $1.076m in 1993-94.
Implicit in that is a recognition that we are dealing with a budget expansionary item. It is explicable, therefore, that the projected additional expenditure this year has, in fact, been, as I understand it, more than that which was predicted. But still, the prediction was there that we would need to make higher estimates in future years. Certainly, quite prematurely, our costs in the corrective services area have increased.
Members know why, and members support generally, as far as I know, the measures we have had to introduce which have caused that extra expenditure. That has resulted from our desire not only to work out our situation with New South Wales and pay some heavier bills from there, but also to develop new diversionary programs which we had not anticipated bringing on stream so quickly.
Finally, Mr Speaker, the debate gives us the chance to say to the Opposition, "Show the same skills, show the same economic analytical abilities that we would expect of you, were you in government; analyse our figures, our suggested overruns, and come up and prove your statements". You have not done that today. The Opposition has not done that.
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