Page 806 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 16 June 1992
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Mr Kaine: Blown out hospital budgets and things like that.
MS FOLLETT: No, no, no; for matters such as the Grants Commission update. The forward estimates, of course, are published at the time, in view of the conditions at the time, but they are subject to review. So the forward estimates position at December is not the position now and there has been a quite significant amount of adjustment placed there. In regard to the other figures that Mr Kaine has mentioned, I do not have the document that he has in front of him; but the figures that I have just given to the Assembly are what we have got from the Commonwealth, and I can only assume that the sums that Mr Kaine has mentioned are subsumed in that grant that I discussed previously.
ACTION Subsidy
MR LAMONT: My question is to the Minister for Urban Services. Today the Federal Leader of the National Party, Mr Tim Fischer, attacked Canberra and Canberrans, stating that they were cocooned and removed from the effects of the recession. In particular Mr Fischer has used ACTION buses as a vehicle for his condemnation of Canberra. What can the Minister tell the Assembly about Mr Fischer's comments and the real cost of ACTION's subsidy to the ACT community?
MR CONNOLLY: I am sure that all members of this Assembly, regardless of their political affiliation, would join in condemning Mr Fischer's irresponsible and petty attacks on Canberra. Although he masquerades as the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and therefore is a person who, one would think, is owed some loyalty by the local branch of the Liberal Party, I would hope that they would have the forthrightness to come out and attack Mr Fischer's foolish remarks.
It was interesting that he particularly seized upon the ACTION bus issue, seemingly believing that this is the only place in Australia where public transport is subsidised. Of course, Madam Speaker, in order to deliver social justice, every government in Australia, Labor or Liberal, or indeed National Party in Queensland, subsidises public transport. If you do not subsidise public transport, disadvantaged persons have no access to transport and are housebound. Elderly people are becoming more that way because of some of the other irresponsible and stupid publications put out by the current Federal Liberal Party, such as their crime pamphlet - but that is another issue.
Mr Fischer and local critics of ACTION should do a bit of research, go to this rather thick blue document - the May 1992 Grants Commission update - and work through it until they get to page 395. They would see documented by the Grants Commission the extent to which the ACTION subsidy is above what it should be. The Grants Commission says that it is about $7.5m on 1990-91 figures; that is that the subsidy is overgenerous. We have put too much subsidy into ACTION buses by, says the Grants Commission, about $7.5m. That, interestingly, roughly translates to the extent to which the ACTION subsidy blew out in the last year in which the Liberal Party was in power here, when Mr Kaine was Treasurer and when nothing was done to deliver micro-economic reform. The sort of usual - - -
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