Page 2081 - Week 07 - Thursday, 16 June 1994
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She did not deal with the major issues then, and she is not dealing with them now. In that budget reply in 1989, almost without very much thought at all, with just a little bit of thought about what the possibilities were, I sketched the outline of a major program to restructure health delivery in this Territory. It was about 10 lines in that budget reply speech and out of that grew the hospital restructuring program - a $166m program in 1990 dollars. That remains to this day the only major restructuring decision that has been made in this Territory by any government since we started self-government in 1989. There has been no comparable major decision about restructuring and changing the way that we do business in an attempt to achieve economies and deliver things better and at lower cost. But here we are again, just another such year, with no major initiatives.
The Leader of the Opposition came up with a three-year strategy which will totally reverse those trends in this Government's budgets that are leading us down the path to massive public debt and continuing inefficiency. So once again it takes the Leader of the Opposition to point the way for this Government. Hopefully, by February next year, this Government will be history, and the Opposition, the Liberal Party in government, will be able to get on with doing what it has always intended to do, and that is to totally restructure the way government is run, and do it better and do it cheaper.
There are some things in this budget that I think warrant comment. There is a lot of deception in it. Just look at the capital works program and you can see what I mean. The Government trumpets its proposed expenditure on its capital works budget this year, and it puts on it a figure of something in excess of $200m, without looking it up. But that includes almost all of the casino premium funds that should never have been included in the Government's budget. That was a windfall profit over and above budget revenues. It should have been spent over and above budget expenditures for the purposes for which it was identified, and it should have been spent a year-and-a-half ago. If you take that out of the Government's capital works program it starts to look pretty sick, even compared to last year's capital works program. So here is the deception. You put all these things in there, pad them up and make the program look good.
Even beyond that, there is a statement put out indicating all of the great initiatives that are going to be taken by this Government. One of them, one of the major items of deception, relates to my own electorate of Brindabella. In this we are told that the Government is going to produce an enclosed oval in Tuggeranong. I defy the Minister to show me in there where there is one cent being spent on that project this year. There is nothing being spent on that project this year. The expenditure does not begin until the year 1995-96, and the expenditure is spread over a three-year period. Yet the Government has the effrontery, in this year's budget, to produce this as one of their budget initiatives. It is not a budget initiative at all. At this time it is a pipedream. It is a concept in the mind of some member of the Government, or maybe even one of its bureaucrats, that has found its way into the budget. So next year they will be trumpeting this new initiative. The year after they will be trumpeting this new initiative. The year after that they still will be trumpeting this new initiative.
Mr Connolly: I am pleased that you are confident that we will still be in government to be trumpeting. Thank you for that.
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