Page 1217 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 11 May 1993
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of the needs and the wants of ordinary Canberrans, or even their representative bodies. The list of organisations that Ms Follett keeps using when she talks about consultation are hardly representative. They are not rank and file Canberrans; they are not the community councils that continue to complain about not being consulted. They, on the whole, are government structured bodies, put together by government and with government nominated people on them. That cannot be perceived to be consulting with the community. No, we have not heard a peep out of this Government, and I am not surprised, because they have no plans to deal with the situation if it happens as the Grants Commission anticipates.
If the Grants Commission report is adopted as is, the financial position of the ACT will be far less sustainable than it is now, and I think Labor should be exceedingly worried. What is the Government going to do? Certainly from statements made by Ms Follett in question time and later today they do not have a clue. Are they going to cut back services, as they are already doing in areas such as police, rescue, hospital services - and the list goes on? Are they going to raise taxes or bring in new taxes to make up the difference? The down side of this, of course, is that it reduces private expenditure, and I do not think anybody wants that; but then, Ms Follett indicated in question time that, no, we were not going to have any new taxes.
This quite dramatically limits the things that can be done. Are they going to make ACT government business enterprises - assuming that we have any real ones - more efficient, or maybe even sell them off altogether to raise revenue, just like the Federal Labor Government has done with Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank? This would be worth while, but not if they were to put the revenue back into recurrent expenditure. They must use it, if they do that, to actually pay off debt or the like. I am sure that Ms Follett would not quite understand that. Are they going to make the savings by reducing the public service or introducing lower employer contributions to government superannuation now that we have the green light on a separate ACT public service? In other words, are they going to screw the public service? It appears that we are not going to do that either now, from what Mr Berry says; so again another option is totally excluded. If they do cut back the maintenance on roads, public art works, buildings, it only leads to extra expenditure problems later and, of course, more importantly, will lower our quality of life in the ACT. There is all this to deal with and make decisions about, and there is a deathly silence from this Government.
I and my colleagues, and I am sure the people of Canberra, have absolutely no sympathy for them. The Government has known for a long time that the level of Commonwealth funding was going to be cut; in fact, it was going to be pruned back gradually every year. They have also known that this year, the 1992-93 year, was going to be a hard year, and so, on it would go. We have known for a very long time that this was going to happen, and where are the plans? Where have they consulted the community groups, the Belconnen Community Council and the other groups around that spend an awful lot of their time and effort trying to help and to make the ACT a better place in which to live?
Mr Berry: Is that what they call help?
MRS CARNELL: Trying to help us.
Mr Humphries: That is on the record, Mr Berry.
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