Page 2128 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 29 May 1991
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time and time again, the Minister unable to answer questions on the Ambulance Service, on the number of beds available, on what services are available; and unable and unwilling to assist when constituents have raised legitimate problems with the health service. Instead, he has chosen to criticise those very constituents.
We have seen the health budget blow out to an extent that the Chief Minister, the Treasurer, acknowledged yesterday as being $17m on the recurrent budget, with no attempt by the Minister or the Treasurer to take control of that situation. We have seen the hospitals redevelopment project proceed, again with indecent haste, and again without the best interests of the Canberra community in mind.
Nowhere have they considered the people who might need to use that service, the people who might need emergency services through the night, the people who might need ambulances. They are at the bottom of the heap as far as this Alliance has been concerned. They have bored on with their own agenda, their own Liberal agenda, for the privatisation of the ACT health service. That agenda has been what has driven the Health Minister and the Treasurer, not the interests of the ACT community.
Most recently, of course, we have seen the Alliance attempt to destroy the very basis of our leasehold system in the ACT. I want to be quite clear; the ACT land is a community asset. It does not belong to the Liberal Party, to the Alliance Government, to any of the developers around town, or to anybody other than the ACT community. Their interests must be paramount.
What we have seen under this shameful Alliance is an attempt to, in effect, give away the farm - not even to sell it off, but to give it away to the developers. They have given an undertaking and announced an undertaking to renew commercial leases without a premium. Not only does that cost us money now, not only does that mean that we, in effect, lose control of our leasehold system to the whim of the developers; what that means is that future generations of Canberrans will be doing without the premiums that would otherwise have been paid on the renewal of those leases. It is a shameful decision, not just for the present, not just because it compromises the interests of the community at the moment, but because of its total lack of vision. It compromises well into the future the revenue base of this Territory and the community's interest in its major asset, namely, its land.
What we have seen, Mr Speaker, is a government hell-bent on implementing those sorts of policies - policies aimed at the destruction of our community - and what we have seen is a willing and cooperative partner in that Alliance - namely, the Residents Rally - seeking to wriggle out of their own policy obligations in respect of all of those matters. Their members have chosen policy directions for
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