Page 3947 - Week 13 - Thursday, 17 October 1991
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talk to them and bring things to their homes to do something for their lives. Another proposal was for $38,000 to make up for a breach of faith by the Commonwealth Government on the Melba child-care centre.
There was the proposal for vacation and outside school hours care for children with special needs. There are children who go to after hours care who have special needs. An amount of $30,000 was proposed just to pick that up. There was also the outdoor wilderness program for our juvenile offenders, which I felt a strong personal commitment to - a commitment deeply shared by many of the staff in the government - at a cost of $286,000.
Of course, there was also the residential service for men, male domestic violence perpetrators, who get booted out, justifiably, but who then go off to the club or off to their mates to booze and become a worse menace. It is generally agreed - and those of us who have had those orders served on men know this full well - that there is nowhere for those blokes to go to. We know this particularly if they have been our clients sometimes. We needed $400,000 to get them a place where they could go.
Some of the more eminent community workers in this community, women such as Pat Sorby from Cura Casa, and others who are on the moderate left - if I may take that liberty; I will stand corrected and apologise to Pat Sorby for that description if she takes offence - supported this notion. But the rad fems did not, because it gave some money to deal with the male problem. The fact is that it dropped out of the proposed budget.
I could go on and on, but the list did amount to about $5m or $6m. I figured that with Mr Kaine I might get half of that and half of those proposals up. I had the success last year with Mr Kaine that suggested to me that I would get that. I believe that, regrettably and sadly, we went backwards on social justice by putting the Follett Government into power. I feel partly personally responsible for having some trust in the Labor Party's sense of social justice. The shame of it all is that a number of those initiatives that I have mentioned, such as neighbourhood-type initiatives for children's safety, could easily have been funded by effective negotiations with the NRMA over that $40m surplus.
I am sick and tired of the Liberal-Labor banter over the budget. The fact of the matter is that, if Mr Berry goes down to the youth centre, to ACTCOSS, to the situations where people on the left congregate, he will see that his name is mud. His Government's name is mud where it counts - in his bailiwick. I do not know whether they will transfer their votes to the Rally. But I will tell you this: Their blood oath for your party is weakening. You ran out on social justice. You had the temerity to issue an additional budget paper stating that the Labor budget was founded on social justice. What a joke!
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