Page 3481 - Week 11 - Thursday, 14 October 1993
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What are you doing about it, Minister? It is your problem. You were jumping up and down and making a lot of noise about it a few months ago, but now you have gone quiet. You have just joined the band wagon, saying that the easiest way out of this is just to whack another couple of cents a litre onto the tax; that is the way to go. Next year, when we are in a bit more trouble, you will whack another couple of cents a litre on; no problem. What the Chief Minister has been saying for four years is totally irrelevant. It is not relevant to the argument at all. I would like to see the Government do something about this, and I was most impressed when Mr Connolly said a few months ago that he was going to fix it. I thought he meant that. He fixed it by sticking another one-and-a-quarter cents a litre on the price of petrol; that is the way he fixed it. It is easy to see why the members of the Government get so sensitive in a debate like this. They cannot defend themselves. They are trying to defend the indefensible.
Mr Connolly, a few minutes ago, set about telling the Opposition what its responsibilities were and were not. Madam Speaker, this argument is about the responsibilities of the Government. I would have liked Mr Connolly to spend some time telling us what he considers the responsibilities of the Government to be in this case and what he intends to do about it. But no, he attacks the Opposition. He tries to tell the Opposition what its responsibilities are and are not. It is a very good defence. When you want to defend yourself, go on the attack. That is the way to do it. It does not work in this case because the 300,000 people out there who are bearing the brunt of the cost of all this are not listening to you, Mr Connolly. They do not believe you, any more than I do.
Let us talk about the responsibilities of government. Mr Connolly referred to this $26m that Mr Humphries is going to rip out of their revenue system. I think Mr Lamont said that it is 540 teachers, or words to that effect. Mr Connolly said that it is half the police budget. It is a lot of other things as well. For example, Madam Speaker, it is about two-thirds of the salary bill of the 500-odd people that this Government intends to make redundant this year. The annual salary bill for 550 people is about $35m. Now we are starting to put the thing into some sort of perspective. These are the sorts of things that the Government should be doing to get the expenditure side of its budget down, rather than looking for ways of jacking up the revenue side. That is what the Government should have been doing for three years. To put it into perspective, it is two-thirds of the annual salary bill of the people that the Government now says that it wants to get rid of. It will be interesting to see whether it succeeds.
It also just about equals the amount of overspend that Mr Berry carries in his health budget. If he were serious about balancing the budget, reducing the burden on the taxpayer and getting the budget down to where it should be, he would be cutting $26m off his health budget, which would be about right, and he would not have to collect the $26m by jacking up the price of petrol by four-and-a-quarter cents a litre. When we start putting things into percentages and relating to things, we need to relate them to the right things. We need to relate them to the things that the Government should be doing. Mr Connolly introduced this concept of responsibility. It is the Government's responsibility. It is not the responsibility of the Opposition. We should not have to do this.
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