Page 1033 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 19 March 1991
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get the money from to fulfil the promises that they are making in terms of reopening the Royal Canberra Hospital and setting the clock back into the unproductive days. Where the money comes from, who knows. I suppose Mr Berry and Ms Follett will wave their magic wands and the pot of gold will appear. I am sorry to have to tell them that it does not work that way.
Mr Stefaniak: Just like Victoria and South Australia.
MR KAINE: Yes. South Australia was mentioned. We have seen what happened when Labor governments in other parts of Australia followed the pot of gold theory. It does not work. They run up such a high public debt that the governments themselves are forced to - - -
Mr Collaery: They will privatise their own party.
MR KAINE: They will privatise the government. They will not be able to afford to run it otherwise. We have seen the consequences of that. Ms Follett talks about the fact that I said that our forward estimates were fact. Ms Follett seemed to think that hers were fact, too. She gave us a $35m deficiency that we had to make up. That was just on the recurrent account.
I would still be surprised to find out how Ms Follett was going to make up that $35m deficiency on her own forward estimates had she been in a position of having to deal with it. We confronted the issue by increasing revenues and by significantly cutting expenditures in this current fiscal year. I wonder how she would have dealt with it. She never tells us how she would have done it. It is very easy to sit over there. Just for once, in one of these debates, let us have something constructive from the other side.
In terms of policies, where is the Labor Party's policy? Where is their economic statement about what they see as the future of Canberra? Where is their financial philosophy under which they would finance the Territory in a situation of declining revenue? We never hear anything from them on these issues because they are so bereft of ideas; they simply do not know. As I said earlier, their would-be Treasurer must go home every night and sleep soundly because she does not have to confront the issues. Ms Follett knows that we have to confront those issues. She knows that we are confronting them head on and doing what needs to be done.
The Leader of the Opposition had the effrontery to talk about ACT small businesses facing bankruptcy. We might well ask why they are facing bankruptcy. It would not, of course, have anything to do with the fact that the whole national economy is in tatters because of the actions of the Labor Government at the Federal level. It would not have anything to do with the fact that elsewhere in Australia where there are Labor governments the financial and economic situation has absolutely fallen apart at the
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