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Alliance Government attempted to deal with. We began to restructure the public service. We began to dispose of assets that we did not need and could not afford, and the like. When the Labor Government took office again that all stopped. There has been no move since to confront any of the major issues of restructuring that is necessary.

Today, after three years of Labor budgets, we have a health system that is in absolute disarray. We have a public sector that, six years after self-government, has not been restructured to the slightest degree. We have had a series of budgetary management exercises year after year where revenues have been up against estimates, except for the last year of the three, and expenditures have been down against estimates. The Chief Minister, every year, has chortled and claimed, “This is good management. We brought our budget in with a surplus”. In fact, that is equally a myth which I will come to in a minute. We have seen three years of exhausting every dollar's worth of reserves that the Territory had accumulated, some of which came to us from the Commonwealth after self-government. Today those reserves have been reduced virtually to zero.

We have had a claim of no borrowing. The former Chief Minister made a great virtue out of the fact that we did not borrow anything. That is a myth too. We did borrow. Not only did we borrow; but, as I have said before, we consumed every dollar of reserve funds that existed when we took self-government and have accumulated since. In terms of the reserve situation, even the Auditor-General of the Australian Capital Territory has commented, in one of his recent reports, upon the fact that the Government has stripped the cupboard bare and we have used up all our reserve moneys. So, it is not only me saying this; there are some very eminent authorities saying this as well.

Let us focus for a moment, Mr Speaker, on the 1994-95 budget, the third of the Follett budgets. What have we seen in 1994-95? I mentioned that for the two preceding budgets revenue was fortuitously up and expenditure was fortuitously down. The Chief Minister of the day claimed, “This is good management”. In 1994-95, suddenly it reversed. Revenue was way down and expenditure was way up. Is she standing up now and saying that this was good management? What we have had, Mr Speaker, for three years, is an economy and a budget that managed itself. There was no management. It has been out of control. It was out of control in 1992-93. It was out of control in 1993-94. It sure as heck is out of control in 1994-95. I wonder whether the former Chief Minister is going to claim now that this is good management.

We had budgetary situations where there was simply no provision for all kinds of expenditure that occurred. We have now discovered that there was $257,000 overexpended in her own Executive budget. We discovered that there was $500,000 spent on a clean up Canberra campaign in the weeks leading up to the election campaign, obviously intended to buy a few votes. It was never budgeted for. In fact, I understand that it was taken out of the Urban Services vote. How can you mysteriously conjure up $500,000 out of an Urban Services vote? You do it deliberately to buy votes. That is not good management; it is opportunism. The estimated cost of the Eastman trial is $3.5m. Not a single cent was put into the budget for it. The Eastman trial has been going on for years. This Government did not put one cent in its budget to cover the cost.

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