Page 2413 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 6 August 1991
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Concerns with the Hospital Redevelopment project have to be resolved ...
That is a remarkable statement! It continues:
The Government will be endeavouring to provide an array of quality services at affordable prices ...
et cetera, et cetera. That is another very vague statement. I have to say that that really is not good enough in the circumstances. Health is perhaps the single most important, most significant part of the ACT budget at the present time and, for reasons which are quite obvious to us all, questions in this area need to be answered very quickly. There are, in that respect, absolutely no answers in this document in the area of health, and anybody seeking to find solutions to those problems will have to look elsewhere.
Of course, we would all be somewhat more enlightened if the Government were to release the document which it now has in its possession and which I understand it has had in its possession for the last week - a document of great importance to the future of this Territory's health service but which continues to be suppressed by the Government. I sincerely hope that we can get some answers by the release of that document in the very near future, perhaps even this afternoon in the next ministerial statement.
Mr Speaker, some features of this document had a certain ring of familiarity about them. I see that Ms Follett promises a balanced budget. She promises to recognise and promote the role of the private sector, to minimise Territory borrowings and so on. I might quote just three short references concerning budgetary matters in terms of government goals. The first is "to promote the development of the private sector" in the ACT. The second goal is "to produce a balanced recurrent budget". The third goal is to minimise the Territory's borrowings.
Those are very laudable aims. But in fact, Mr Speaker, I am quoting not from the 1991 budget statement but from the 1990 budget statement which Mr Kaine released as Treasurer in March of last year. Of course the goals are very similar. For all their bluster, all their criticism, all their carping from the sidelines, it turns out that the basic budget strategy employed by the Follett Government, at least on paper, is exactly the same as that employed by the much criticised Alliance Government. We will have to get quite used to that kind of doubletalk.
In this budget strategy document we see that there is a recognition of the concept of a leaner bureaucracy. On page 10 Ms Follett says:
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