Page 1036 - Week 04 - Thursday, 18 June 1992
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Our budget has experienced a higher than expected call for resources from several areas.
Removing the doublespeak, what Ms Follett is saying here is, "Our budget has blown out, but I will not or I cannot tell you where or by how much". It is a clear admission that there are budget blow-outs that she has not revealed to us.
The Opposition is very supportive, as I have said, of the ideas behind many of Ms Follett's platitudes; but we are most concerned about what she intends to do about them, and that is what the strategy statement should have told us. It requires commitments to be made and honoured and it requires an expression of just how the budget will be framed. What are her priorities? What exactly is the shortfall? How will she make up this shortfall? Where will additional revenues be levied and where will the costs of government be cut? On whom will the burden fall? These are some of the factors that most people would have expected her strategy statement to deal with, but it is silent on all of those issues.
Ms Follett can be assured that we would take very seriously and would support any real government proposals to reduce the costs of delivering government services. If efficiencies are achieved in the delivery of services, then, very simply, real cuts to service delivery will be minimised. This reform process is one which the Opposition has been promoting for the last three years. The hospital reconstruction project was the major but by no means the only Liberal initiative in this regard. I must say that Mr Berry has dropped the ball on this one, as his budget performance testifies. That project was entered into to achieve annual budget savings of $8m, not to authorise annual budget blow-outs through strange business rules unique to the health portfolio.
I must refute one erroneous assertion put forward by Ms Follett in her speech. She said that the difference between the Liberals and the Labor Party was that we, the Liberals, "do not believe that we need an economy with both a public sector and a private sector". That statement is simply not true, and I only hope that her understanding of budgetary processes is better than her understanding of the Liberal Party's philosophy. The Liberal Party remains committed to a vibrant and thriving private sector - so do a lot of other people in the community, and I will come to that in a minute - free, as much as is practicable, from government interference and from excessive taxation. But we also support the role of the public sector, and I remind the Chief Minister that I have long advocated establishing our own ACT Government Service. Only two weeks ago I welcomed the proposal to establish such a service, and my reasons are very simple. It gives the ACT ultimate and unfettered control over the performance of our public service and is part of the total process of self-determination for the ACT.
The Chief Minister, by contrast, has not even to this day been overly forthcoming in her support for this proposition. In fact, the recent proposal did not come from her; it came from the Prime Minister. I have commented elsewhere on the Government's propensity for responding to initiatives from others, and this is just another example. There are obvious functions in which the public sector must maintain an involvement. In health and education - two of the major functions for which government is responsible - the public sector must maintain a major role. So must it in such functions as public transport and the provision of welfare services. However, the Opposition also supports private sector involvement in the provision of these services. The delivery of services to the public in many areas can often be achieved with the highest level of efficiency and the best
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