Page 2186 - Week 07 - Thursday, 6 June 1991
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This Government, this Alliance Government under Trevor Kaine, has faced that problem, and you people opposite have not done the people of Canberra the courtesy of acknowledging that there is a problem and acknowledging that at least our solutions are facing that basic problem. The reason you have not done so is that you do not have any solutions of your own. You do not even understand, I suspect, the nature of the problem itself.
Comparisons have been made in the past between Ms Follett and Joan Kirner, the Premier of Victoria for the time being. Mrs Kirner's solution to the problem of, for example, a shortfall in the education budget was to sack several thousand teachers. I might note also that in 1989, while in government for only seven months, the ACT Labor Party also removed some 50 teachers from the ACT Teaching Service. We have to ask ourselves how Labor would deal with the problem of saving money in education, because they would have to face that problem. Nobody can avoid that problem. We would have to assume that Labor would do so by sacking teachers. It did so on the previous occasion. They cannot pretend that they have not done so before. They have done so in other States, and I believe that Labor here would do so. That stands in stark contrast to the position taken by this Government, that buildings and bricks and mortar are less important to education than are teachers and students.
Mr Speaker, Bill Wood said today that the decision we made in this place would have significant effects on the future of Canberra, and I agree with that proposition; but I think the effects on the people of Canberra of passing this no-confidence motion today and electing a Labor government have not been spelt out. We do not know what they are. We do not know what Labor's financial strategy is. They have not spelt it out. They sit there deliberately, intently, tight-lipped. They have no intention of coming before us today and spelling out what they are going to do, because they might lose the vote today and, if they do, they would be up for attack over the next few months in opposition. Clearly, they are not prepared to do that. So, what they want to do instead is simply say that what the Alliance is doing is wrong and they would do better. How, we cannot say.
I will not accept that. I intend to support the Government today and defeat the no-confidence motion because I believe that Labor has failed to answer basic questions. Until I have answers to those basic questions I, for one, do not believe that anybody in this Territory should take very seriously the alternatives, so-called, being put forward by the ACT Labor Opposition. I think also, Mr Speaker, that the Territory's very difficult problems need in the first place to be acknowledged and to be faced constructively and squarely, not to have people pretend that they are, in fact, not real problems at all.
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