Page 3946 - Week 13 - Thursday, 17 October 1991
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In fact, this budget is not through yet, and the Rally has already signalled that the Government is going to have trouble at the appropriation stage in relation to at least one part of the budget. So, I am not prepared to concede at this stage that the Appropriation Bill is going to go through unamended.
Mr Berry: How tough are you prepared to be? Are you prepared to be real tough?
MR COLLAERY: I tell Mr Berry that I am not prepared to concede that the budget, the Appropriation Bill, is going to go through unamended. We have the right to amend the budget, subject to certain restrictions, as is laid down in the self-government Act. What I want this MPI to say is that, given the budget development work done by the Alliance Government up to the end of May 1991, I believe that the Follett Cabinet failed to capitalise on the verve, the flair and the imagination that were in a lot of our preparatory budget documents.
Mr Berry: What, the same as your $6m wish list?
MR COLLAERY: I have that wish list here. I am glad that Mr Berry introduced it. He now concedes that he saw it, as indeed he did. Prior to the fall of the short-lived Kaine independent Government, in that list of new policy proposals much of the social justice aspect of the forthcoming Alliance budget was handed to the Follett Government. She got it on a plate. Under the Cabinet conventions, she may not have had easy access to those proposals, but she got them.
They proposed things like this: An expansion of ACT counselling services to deal with much needed grief and bereavement counselling - a modest sum of money; an after hours emergency service for children, $220,000; a child protection community education program, identified through well informed surveys as being needed, $91,000; and a prisoner reintegration service initiative.
Mr Berry stood with me down at Garema Place. We agreed on a bipartisan approach to prisoner return issues, so as not to raise hopes unjustifiably, and I am pleased to say that it still persists. I would have thought that Mr Berry would have been strong enough in his Cabinet to have got the $400,000 to start to bring some of our prisoners home, particularly those prisoners graded C2 or C3 downwards in the New South Wales system, because they are graded as quite safe to the community. I was saddened to see that proposal dropped out, but I have not taken a political point over it.
There was also the proposal for the daytime activities for severely disabled people, for $25,000. There are a number of people isolated in homes who need some daytime activities. People can go there and read books to them,
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