Page 2149 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 29 May 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
I was heartened to hear the Leader of the Opposition indicate that her party, the Labor Party, will be supporting the motion of the Chief Minister to adjourn this Assembly so that the necessary arrangements can be made. There are a number of things that she said, however, that I am somewhat concerned about. They were said in the presence of a lot of people, I understand, from some of the school sites. I think a couple of things need to be reinforced in relation to the issue of running this Territory, especially the issue of paying our own way.
I think the Minister for Health, Education and the Arts raised a very valid point in his excellent speech when he indicated just how hard the decisions were in relation to closing those schools and how hard the decision was in relation to Royal Canberra Hospital.
Mr Berry: I saw him smiling. They could not have been too hard.
MR STEFANIAK: I do not think he was smiling, Wayne. I have lived in Canberra all my life. A lot of people saw me, too, in relation to the issue of closing the schools. I saw the trauma some people faced in relation to that. I was born in Royal Canberra Hospital, Wayne. Indeed, a number of people in the gallery might have been, too. A number of people have had members of their family born there. That is a quite sentimental issue. However, the fact is that the Federal Government put the ACT on an independent financial footing, I think, as early as about 1986.
Let us not kid ourselves about self-government either. One of the major reasons, I am sure, why the ACT was given self-government was funding; that the Federal Government was not prepared to continue to support the Territory to the same extent as it had in the past. Rightly or wrongly, that occurred. We were given self-government as of May 1989. The Federal Government should have upgraded the Royal Canberra Hospital back in the early 1980s. It did not do so. The Federal Government is not going to come to our rescue, as Gary Humphries has quite clearly indicated from reading the Grants Commission report. We are still, in many areas, overfunded compared with other States. We simply have to cut costs. There is really no other alternative.
We simply cannot borrow our way out of it. Successive governments around Australia have tried that. Look at Victoria. What an absolute disgrace. Look at Western Australia, South Australia and, indeed, Tasmania as well. All of those States have Labor governments. And what about the Federal Government? What about the national debt? That has risen from some $33 billion back in 1983 when Mr Hawke took over to about $170 billion now. Really, it is
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .