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At the end of the day, we get less money for the Territory because of this botched deal on financial assistance and we end up with a high cost to the Territory's coffers for the botched land swap. We end up with a situation where nobody has any confidence in the early decisions of this Government.

We have a government that does not want to come out in front of the people. Mr Humphries said here in a debate last week that he did not think open government meant the people, that is the voters, being able to see the powerful people at work. I would have thought that was open government. It is about the people seeing their elected representatives at work, not hiding them. Today we have seen the unfortunate spiralling downwards of job prospects in the Territory. That has to be because of the hiatus in government that we have had in the Territory. We had a government elected in February, and after the Chief Minister's election we had to wait seven weeks before the first Assembly sitting.

There was a lot of froth and bubble, as usual, about the budget, and at the end of the day the Government said, “We cannot do it; it is too hard. We are going to have to put it off for three months or so”. What is the business sector doing out there? They are watching the bottom line all the time and saying to themselves, “We cannot have any confidence in this mob because we do not know what they are going to do. We do not know what they are up to. They obviously cannot put a budget together”.

Mr De Domenico: Have you spoken to the business community?

MR BERRY: If they are so confident, Mr De Domenico, why are they not employing people? You ought to be ashamed to call yourself the employment spokesperson when you see what is happening out there as a result of the lack of confidence and the uncertainty in the business sector. Quite clearly, job prospects have plummeted just in the short term of this Government, and you can see it on the graph. Have a look at the graph.

Mr De Domenico: It is all our fault that in seven weeks everything happens.

MR BERRY: Of course. If you have a look, right up to February things were going okay, and then they plummeted downwards. They invited their Liberal colleagues up from Victoria to poach our businesses and our jobs, while they were up here trying to help them set up the government. You get the most conservative people in Australia to help you out to form a government. You pull them up from Melbourne and, while they are up here in the dark, after you have finished, they rummage through the family silver to pick the good stuff to take back out of here again. These people should have been frisked at the border because they were taking out of this town jobs, jobs and more jobs.

That ought to be your focus instead of mucking around with this ideological stuff you are going on about, with corporatisation and how much more freedom and flexibility we will have with corporatisation. The bottom line is: What services does it deliver? Look at the overseas experience, and you can see that it is more expensive with fewer services. You can see that here, with the model that was in place, there was an emphasis on the provision of services to the Territory. You have not proven anything in relation to the services that are provided. All you are able to show is this fixation on ideology and corporate models: Competition in the private sector is what we have all been waiting for;

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