Page 3540 - Week 12 - Thursday, 19 September 1991
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Commonwealth funding, we have had to deal with a significant and major reduction of finance, in real terms. As the Treasurer herself has stated, leaving aside the $53m which had previously been withheld, the reduction in the ACT's general revenue funding base is almost 20 per cent in real terms in a single year.
It is against this background that we need, I believe, to recognise the magnitude of our current economic predicament and get on with the job of dealing with it - something that this Government cannot, or perhaps will not, do. Labor failed to address the problem in its first term of office. It has failed again, miserably, this time, particularly perhaps because it has at least one eye on the forthcoming election. Fortunately, our Treasurer has, at least, partly acknowledged the reality, although she could not quite bring herself to the point of finally conceding unreservedly that there is a problem. The best she could do was to agree that our problem was "not ephemeral" but then, she is into euphemisms.
Despite this belated partial acknowledgment of the problem that confronts us, the whole thrust in this Labor budget seems to be directed towards survival, at any cost, of Labor in government, without regard for the costs inflicted on the community in the process. Of course, only certain people have been selected to bear the brunt of this budget, whilst others have been quarantined from its effects. It is quite clear that those not so quarantined are those who are not recognised by Labor as members of their constituency. These include the parents of students at private schools, small businessmen, small "capitalists" who have chosen to make minor investments in real estate, and public servants thought to be expendable by the Trades and Labour Council.
This budget should have begun with the setting of very clear-cut strategic objectives for the ACT for the next year and beyond, as mine did last year. It clearly has not done so, but focuses instead on short-term problems and solutions. There is no evidence, and the Treasurer does not pretend to produce any evidence, of any awareness of or commitment to the real problems which cry out for long-term strategies and solutions.
There has not been an ALP government yet, whether at the State or Federal level, that has been able to realistically tackle the problems in which, because of their ideological chains, they have enmeshed their communities. This budget can be likened to shifting the deckchairs on the Titanic in order to give it a bit of balance before it sinks.
Let me just go back to the 1989 budget that Ms Follett delivered - the budget that was, until then, the greatest consultative hoax of all time. How did Ms Follett balance the books? More importantly, what provisions did she make, knowing that the Grants Commission was about to recommend a substantial reduction in Commonwealth funding to the ACT?
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