Page 1032 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 19 March 1991
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Once again, she said that the Government has no policy, no strategy. The strategy has now been spelt out several times. It can be encapsulated in four simple statements. The first is to foster the private sector, because that is where the jobs and the future revenues for the Government are going to come from. It is to balance the recurrent budget. We have done that this year. We will do it again next year. It is to minimise borrowings. We have reduced the borrowings significantly this year, as compared to what they were in previous years. We will continue to maintain our borrowings to an absolute minimum. Finally, it is to make maximum use of existing assets. That is our philosophy. The whole objective is to cut costs, to reduce the cost to the taxpayer, to reduce taxation to the minimum, and to deliver an effective service in so doing.
Of course, in meeting those commitments we are setting about restructuring the ACT Government Service, to make it do its job better. We have embarked on a hospital rationalisation program which will, in two years' time, present two hospitals which will deliver exactly the same level of service as the three hospitals previously did. There will not be any reduction in beds. There will be a consolidation of technical resources, of a medical nature, that will provide, probably, a better service than we have had in the past. This nonsense about dismantling the hospital system is a clear acknowledgment that the people opposite simply do not understand the realities of the day.
We have embarked on a schools consolidation program with the objective of reducing the cost and restoring short resources to the Government so that they can be used in other areas that are more important; for example, so that we can provide facilities for the ageing, for the disabled and the disadvantaged in our community, rather than having those resources locked up unproductively in schools. Of course, we have set about corporatising certain government enterprises with the objective that they will become more commercially oriented and will operate at less cost to the taxpayer. They are not being subsidised but have to operate in a purely commercial and competitive way. These are just some of the things that the Government is doing to address the budgetary problems that are confronting us.
What would the Opposition do if suddenly overnight the roles were reversed and they were sitting over here as the Government? Would they reopen the schools? They have said that they are going to. Would they reopen the Royal Canberra Hospital? They have said that they are going to. They know well that they could not do any of those things because they have not the faintest idea where the money would come from.
Mr Berry, in particular, prattles on about the hospitals restructuring program. He did not even know where he was going to get the money from to maintain the Royal Canberra Hospital. He had no idea. He has no idea where he might
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