Page 2409 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 6 August 1991
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MR DUBY (3.51): Mr Speaker, today, 6 August, marks a milestone for the Government. I believe that it is the second anniversary of their term in government. They took government on 6 June, if I remember correctly; so today we have had two months of the second Follett Government, and already we are seeing a return to the famous Follettnomics that we experienced in 1989. This budget strategy statement which was put out by the Chief Minister, on behalf of her colleagues and herself, in my view is very long on words and very short on figures. Indeed, I would almost regard it as an exercise in the unsaid word. I was going to say "deceit", but I decided that that is not really appropriate. It really is an exercise in the unsaid word because, whilst it is long on rhetoric, it is very short on facts.
It does demonstrate, though, that again we in the ACT are going to have to experience a period in which we have people who do not really know what the heck they are doing on the treasury benches. From the tone and thrust of this document it is clear that the Follett technique of trying to grope with the problems facing the Territory is to do a fiddle with the numbers, and we are seeing that quite precisely because the capital works expenditure is being transferred. In my view, from what I can see - this is only from words, not figures, because we do not get many figures - the thrust of this statement seems to be that they are going to fiddle the capital works program to pay for the recurrent program. I think that is a disgraceful state of affairs.
In only 61 days this Government has already made some rather remarkable announcements. We all are familiar with things like the reopening of the Lyons and Cook schools. We do not agree with that; but that is a political decision, and the Government, in its wisdom and with its previous commitment to those programs, is quite entitled to reintroduce them. That is part of their political program. If they can find some way of funding that arrangement with the moneys available in the education budget or the whole budget generally, so be it.
But today we have heard some remarkable examples of what I regard as gross wastage of public expenditure by this Government. For example, we are going to have the Ainslie tip reopened at a cost of some hundreds of thousands of dollars of capital expenditure, not to mention expenditure in the order of some $300,000 per annum forever and a day, if this Government has its way. Yet at the same time they announced that they cannot afford to fund a badly needed hospice in this community, which is long overdue and for which we had prudently provided.
At the same time we have also heard announcements - I notice that they are not mentioned here - about the excellent swimming facilities which were to be provided at Tuggeranong being downgraded so that we no longer will have an international standard pool. The Government has
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