Page 2198 - Week 07 - Thursday, 6 June 1991
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The significant overexpenditure in health may be historic, and it may well be part of the lead in Mr Humphries' inherited saddlebags; but the fact is, from the Rally's standpoint, that we kept saying it. We kept saying that we needed to do profound management reviews of the type ultimately recommended by Mr Enfield. It has meant, of course, that we have ended up with a recurrent budget blow-out in health. What it further means to the Rally is that that excessive recurrent loss now presents a prospect of being borne, as the Chief Minister has indicated, by other areas of government. That is axiomatic, perhaps.
Mr Speaker, as a Minister in that Government, I was most unhappy to find that further inroads were to be made into the budget base of areas of my portfolio, particularly community services, justice and the areas of social impact. Making an attempt at balancing the budget in those departments has been difficult enough without shortfalls induced from outside the system, and with mixed luck; but the impending collision between the Rally and the Liberal Party on the economic management of this Territory was the real impasse that we were going to reach within the next few weeks. That is the real issue. As we again discussed very recently with the Chief Minister, the Rally cannot concede that necessary new policy proposals which have been carefully developed in government should go because of our problem with the recurrent budget. We have looked to other matters, and I will come back to what we see as the prescription. I will complete this minor historical review.
The first Kaine budget required Ministers to find a 4 per cent uniform expenditure reduction, and we should not forget that that was what prompted the offer from the Education Minister to close schools. It was not an agenda, and I do not really accept the accusations, put to Mr Humphries on the Labor side of the house, that he set out personally to close schools. He set out to find 4 per cent, and he found it in closing schools; but it is not a priori that he had an agenda to close government schools. I do not believe that he ever said that in any fora that I was present at.
Mr Speaker, I am very unhappy with the concept of uniform expenditure reductions. I believe that they would have been largely dropped in the forthcoming budget anyway; but that approach, which still looms, does not take social priorities into account. It does nothing to tackle built-in featherbedding in our Public Service. It is unrelated to efficiency and work practice concerns. Of course, those cuts became indiscriminate; they lacked sophistication; and they certainly became divisive, because, as we saw in education, the choices were left to those with vested interests. Hence, the weak, the schools, suffered, while the top structures remained there and they even expanded.
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