Page 3213 - Week 10 - Thursday, 16 September 1993
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Every year, the same as everywhere else, we just see across-the-board cuts. The finances of this Assembly are still more or less the same, with the same set of priorities as were set for 1989.
Mr Kaine: Yes, they are almost exactly.
MR MOORE: Yes. That says something particularly about the way this Assembly and the various governments have been able to readjust their own sets of priorities - as if anybody, whether a set of bureaucrats or the Federal Minister at the time, could foresee what the necessary expenditure was going to be to run an assembly such as this.
I released a press release the other day, a little tongue-in-cheek, which described this budget as the ostrich budget because the ostrich government and the chief ostrich had their heads buried in the sand. I think I may have commented about being bird brained and a lack of flight. Either way, there is an important view here about a failure to set priorities. When I looked at the Canberra Times this morning and read how they would go about making some savings, I was appalled. I thought that there at least, when we had an outsider looking in, people would not just look at where you can pick and nick and nip and tuck; they would actually say, "What are the community priorities? How are we going to put our community priorities into effect?". Instead, people are saying that our community priority is money and therefore we are going to do everything in terms of money. It is a sad day when people here tend to respect money and use people instead of using money and respecting people.
There is a series of issues I would like to raise. The first is one of the revenue measures that appear in the budget papers, suggesting that a small number of properties will be surplus to the Territory needs, which would mean revenue of some $11m in this year. The question I would like to ask, first of all, is: Which properties are surplus to Territory needs? My memory, from the estimates committees in the last few Assemblies, is that this Government spends approximately $20m a year on rental, and in one year we are going to sell off $11m in properties that are surplus to needs. We would like the Chief Minister in her reply to explain to us exactly what those properties are and why it is that they are surplus to the Territory's needs.
Turning to health, the Chief Minister in her speech described the ramshackle financial system given to us at self-government. Five years later we can now see some improvements, but what happened in those first years when Labor was in government and then the Alliance Government was in place? We are hoping to see some results from that. I must say that I am not particularly confident that we will see such great results in the health budget. However, I am happy to wait and see.
It seems to me that, rather than seeing efficiencies coming out of new management practices and the further efficiency returns the Chief Minister was talking about, we are seeing longer and longer waiting lists. That is the trade-off, and the trade-off simply is not acceptable. Already today we have heard some discussion on visiting medical officers and the negotiations going on there. It seems to me that it would be appropriate for us to look very carefully indeed at the negotiations that are going on before those contracts are signed.
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