Page 2175 - Week 07 - Thursday, 6 June 1991
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you tuck $10m away there - or maybe it is $15m or whatever. But you get the picture. It is the acclaimed nip and tuck approach, pioneered by Rosemary Follett of the loony left faction of the ACT branch of the Australian Labor Party. I am quite surprised, frankly, that Bob did not consider Rosemary for Paul's job.
But this is not really a laughing matter. I do not seek to trivialise; I seek merely to focus on the paucity and the inadequacy of the Follett Labor alternative. It would be funny, I suppose, if it were not so serious. So, instead of hypothetical examples, allow me to describe an actual example of Follett nip and tuck folly. In the one and only budget that Ms Follett managed to bring down, in 1989, the now Leader of the Opposition, using her famous nip and tuck approach, made provision for savings of $10m - "if necessary". "If necessary", she said, we could nip, say, $5m here and tuck another $5m there - $10m worth of savings following on from a first transitional year in which, we now learn, the ACT was overfunded by a record $135m. And that, incidentally, was not entirely unknown at the time. I had heard a figure of up to $120m being cited by the Commonwealth Treasury, and I am sure that Ms Follett was closer to the Labor Party than I was at the time. So, if I had heard it, I am sure she did.
Ms Follett did this in the same year, by the way, that her Federal Labor colleagues withheld $20m of ACT funds in a special Commonwealth piggy bank. Is it any wonder, then, that when we came to power four months later we found the ACT heading for a $37m deficit? What had happened to the nip and tuck approach? What indeed? Nip and tuck had become rip and tear.
That is not all. It is not the only policy approach of Ms Follett and her Labor colleagues - that team of economic and financial worthies who occupy the benches opposite. There is another plank to the Follett theory of economics. It is called the cruel and cynical hoax, and it applies especially to hospitals and schools - and we have heard more of it here this afternoon. To get the best results from the application of this part of the theory, one needs to be especially skilled at manipulating community expectations. The theory goes like this: To start off with, you promise not to change anything, ever. That is a falsehood, of course, not to say an impossibility. But that is all right, so long as you can sound sufficiently sincere to fool a lot of people. My friends in the media, of course, have spotted the lie a mile off. But a story is a story, and they are happy to come along for the ride.
Next, you carefully select a couple of issues - say, school closures and hospital redevelopment - that are sure to whip up community emotions. Never mind that when you were in government you had done nothing about schools closed the year before by a Federal Labor government; that is totally irrelevant. The public have short memories, and a hefty dose of double-dealing does nothing to detract from the
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