Page 3948 - Week 13 - Thursday, 17 October 1991
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Simone De Beauvoir wrote that the greatest bad faith for those on the left is to posture a thing which they know is not true. It was mauvaise foi of the very worst order that your Government engaged in. You are a Government that failed the people of the ACT when they needed it. There are identifiable needs in the community; there was an identifiable $40m out there, which right until now I have kept very properly quiet about. But I have forced your pace because your budget is not through yet, as Ms Follett properly recognised, and you have $40m with which to effectively negotiate some social equity and justice into your budget to deal with those matters.
Apart from that $40m, what did you do with the $3.5m surplus out of the Community Development Fund? You cannot say that we intended to send it out to roads and bridges at Gungahlin, but you did. Your Government sent it to roads and bridges at Gungahlin. You used the surplus CDF funds to stack them into your recurrent municipal budget. You went to the piggy bank to buy the week's groceries. What kind of budgeting is that? That CDF surplus was destined to be partly allocated, subject to the views of the Alliance Cabinet, to provide for a structured day program for a select group of young disturbed people, to outfit two four-bedroom group homes in the disability services area for $92,000, and so on and so forth.
There were reasonable ways that you could have dealt with some of that CDF surplus, but you did not. You sent it to roads and bridges. The youngsters and the not so young buying out there should help pay the interest on municipal borrowings through their rates, as is done in every other municipality in this country. One borrows on the municipal account, properly and orthodoxly, so that future generations pay those sums. You failed the current generation of Canberrans, particularly in the youth area, at a time when we have youth unemployment of between 16 and 20 per cent.
You do not feel a commitment to this Territory. The CRA chief said on AM the other day that Canberra people were a pampered group. No-one from your Government went on AM to respond to that. No-one responded to point out the social justice needs of this Territory. You have either lost sight of them or turned your back on them. You turned your back on the proclaimed place for inebriates. You pressed us here like crazy last year to create one; we put it into our budget planning and you took it out. Out went your own private member's Bill for an inebriates' drying out place in this Territory, so sorely needed.
So, really, you will squirm on this, and you know it. You squirm on this talk. You might have made a few points off Mr Kaine, but you are in trouble on it. Come out and say whether you are going to fund any of those things before your budget comes up for in-principle debate.
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