Page 3071 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 10 September 1991
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will be approximately $17m less than was budgeted last year. The Master Builders Association have examined the decline in the overall works program represented by that reduction in expenditure and they have quantified that in terms of about 910 jobs in the building industry.
Ms Follett was talking about reducing public sector employment by 250 this year and she will have great difficulty achieving that. We aimed at reducing our public service payroll by about that number last year and we found that it was simply not possible to physically process those people through the system although we had made a provision of something like $13m for redundancy payments. We were not able to achieve that because it was not possible to identify the people and to process them through the system.
But 250 jobs is just infinitesimal compared to what this reduction in the capital works program means for this economy - 910 jobs in the building industry. The BWIU in fact agrees with that. They have also noted that there is a multiplier; that for every job lost in the construction industry itself there are four jobs outside it that flow from this construction work, and that therefore translates into a potential 3,600 jobs or approximately 3,500 jobs that can be lost in the ACT because of this reduction in the capital works program.
I submit, Mr Speaker, that in today's climate, when we are trying to keep some stability in this economy, to make that sort of change in our capital works program without carefully thinking it through is irresponsible. I do not think that the Government has thought it through. That is why we have suggested that some of the projects that they intend to take out of the program should be reinstated. Our recommendations on that are quite specific.
I do not think that the Government can lightly cast aside the careful consideration and the recommendations of the committee. I do not intend to deal with the individual recommendations that we make on a project by project basis, but I think that I must comment on the minority report on this matter put in by Mrs Grassby. It is quite clear that this dissenting report is nothing but a Labor Party, ideologically based, knee-jerk reaction to the recommendations of the committee. I will just quote a few things. In fact, I doubt very much whether this is a dissenting report from Mrs Grassby. I suspect that it is a dissenting report from the Labor Party.
The fact that they attempt to turn this into a political event and set the Labor Party on the one side and the Liberal and Rally members of the committee on the other, and pretend that there is a difference of view between those two political groupings, is quite absurd. I take just some of the words, Mr Speaker. Mrs Grassby says:
I do not believe that the ACT Government can be held responsible for the effects of Commonwealth economic policy on the private sector.
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