Page 30 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 16 February 1993
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even get them into our TAFE system now. What kind of industries do we want to encourage in the ACT? The Chief Minister talked about encouraging industry, but there is not very much evidence of it. What must be provided to meet the social needs of our increasing population?
These are all questions that the Government should be addressing now. Neither Ms Follett's budget nor her plan for 1993 has answered these questions. They simply cannot provide the answer. They reflect a confused vision that mistakes the tools or sees them as a substitute for real vision. The budget should follow the vision - and Ms Follett emphasised the budget; she spoke about it all the time - not the other way round. It should implement the vision in one-year increments. It is not a substitute even for the five-year financial plan that I proposed and worked towards when I was in government. The Government is without a vision of our financial future, as it is devoid of a vision about how we will be living in the next decade, let alone this one.
I have said on many occasions, Madam Speaker, that this year's budget is a do-nothing budget, as was the last one. But it is more than that. It is a visionless, directionless, aimless budget that seeks merely to mark time and avoid doing anything that involves risk. It does nothing to lift the community out of the economic malaise we are in. It provides a soft cushion for our ruin. For the sake of present comfort, we are trading away our future prospects. That might make us feel happy and secure, but our children - the next generation - will not thank this Government and hold it in high esteem for being so lacklustre.
The drift in our affairs is underlined by the Chief Minister's barren vision for this year. The Government's program is dependent on direction from across the lake. Why are we having an ACT Government Service? Because Paul Keating told her to go and establish it. Where is the direction coming from over this side of the lake? What is required is locally directed vision, locally directed ideas, locally directed plans. Fortunately, on 13 March the people of Australia will throw off the burden of a decade of Labor government. We will have vision at last, at a national level at least. But in the ACT I fear we will be left behind by other more active and energetic States and Territories that can see where they are going.
The Chief Minister talked about the Territory Plan. The Territory Plan reflects the turbid notion of the future that the Labor Party is struggling to avoid. They do not even know what they want the future to look like. It has a horizon that is only 10 years away. That horizon will barely allow us to come to terms with the demands of our population now, let alone deal with the problems caused by increased population in the future. We are not dealing with the future in this plan. We are merely extrapolating from our current needs. The Territory Plan needs at least a 15- to 20-year horizon to be adequate, and I think a lot of people would agree with that, except the Government.
I do not blame the planners for this. They cannot create a plan from a vacuum. The guidelines need to be made plain and the vision for our community needs to be clearly stated and fully articulated. But what we have had from this Government so far in planning policy direction terms is virtually zero. There has not been any direction. The Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning has missed an opportunity to make a major advance in urban development by
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