Page 3550 - Week 12 - Thursday, 19 September 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
In other words, Ms Follett has used, among other moneys, the CDF surplus and other capital funds to assist with the recurrent municipal budget. I am sure my colleague Mr Duby will have more to say about that. Mr Acting Speaker, current ratepayers and our Territory piggy bank should not be ransomed to pay for the future road systems in Gungahlin. There should be sufficient municipal borrowings for these infrastructure works and future ratepayers in Gungahlin should pay their share of this through interest servicing, while the lame, the disabled, and those in need are properly attended to.
The broken promises extend to the planned reduction in public hospital beds. The maintenance of public hospital beds was an article of faith, we thought, under Labor. We observe, more in sorrow than in anger, that no faith can be placed any longer in the Labor Party in this Territory.
With youth employment exceeding 20 per cent in the Territory, the paltry half a million dollars allocated to employment support schemes is a sick joke. Some of it is only cosmetic, because the Government has shifted around moneys within the existing TAFE budget. Also, Mr Acting Speaker, the low number of young persons being taken into the public service is itself an indictment of our lack of conscience. The $200,000 for a venture and development scheme does not in any way come near the $500,000 which I was told would be needed to get a youth enterprise collective going. With a budget of about $10m a year in the Chief Minister's Economic Development Division alone, the allocation of only a few hundred thousand dollars is a warped priority.
The Rally has said consistently that the Chief Minister's Economic Development Division has not delivered and should be replaced by an economic policy advisory council made up of eminent financial people, business people, bureaucrats, public sector administrators and others. This has not been done, despite the clear lessons learned interstate and with the Federal Government's EPAC. I exclude the excellent research activity of that division from my remarks.
Mr Acting Speaker, non-consultative divisive cuts to private school funding over a paltry $520,000 are a vote-catching attempt at a sectarian vote. Money could be found quite easily within the budget, and must be found, and we call upon Ms Follett to reverse that decision. The cuts to the three schools singled out in the budget - that is, the two grammar schools and the AME - breach a legitimate expectation those schools had arising from a 1985 Federal Labor promise to continue their funding. We heard all the claims on the other side of the house when we were in government about the legitimate expectation of some government schools to remain open.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .