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In fact, it was 2 per cent of total revenues. Standard and Poor's went even further and said:

This low debt profile provides the ACT with a significant degree of flexibility in dealing with any future fiscal shocks.

That is the truth about the budgetary position of the ACT - not from me, not from the Labor Party, and not from the Liberal Party either; but from one of the world's most respected rating agencies, whose job it is to advise international lenders on the fiscal standing of governments around the world.

Despite all the rhetoric about our debt burden and not spending money we do not have, what have we got from Mrs Carnell? It is very clear what we have got, what the people of Canberra will very quickly learn we have got: The highest level of borrowing ever contemplated by any ACT government, a massive $62m. If there was a massive problem, the question you would have to ask is why action was not taken to fix the problem. Perhaps because, as Standard and Poor's understood very well, it was not there in the first place. It was a fraud on the community. Now Mrs Carnell will attempt to mislead us again. She will say that the Liberals are returning the budget to surplus by the third year. But past budget papers show that, in GFS format, the ACT budget was in surplus in every year except 1994-95 and 1994-95 was fully expected to be in deficit. The forward estimates in last year's budget papers show the budget returning to surplus this year, not having to wait until 1997-98.

What this community needs is to have the community's funds managed wisely. It needs to have capital works that provide much needed community facilities, and it needs the ACT Government to provide those community facilities in a timely manner. Our community does not need a government to tell it that community facilities will not be provided and cannot be afforded, especially when that is manifestly untrue. The budget can be managed with only modest borrowings and the community can have the facilities and the services it needs. To achieve this, the Government's priorities must be appropriate, and this Government's priorities are woefully and disastrously inappropriate. It is blinkered by its ideological obsessions, and inevitably, therefore, its priorities are all wrong. It can afford a $1m consultancy to tell it how to slash and burn in the health system, but it cannot afford $33,000 to ensure that mentally ill women have a refuge bed to go to. It can afford a private consultant to review the salaries and redefine the jobs of senior public servants, but it cannot provide funds to community groups to feed the homeless and the poor in our community. It can afford to waste over $8m to raze the buildings on Acton Peninsula, to tear them down, but it cannot provide an emergency services centre in Gungahlin or an indoor pool in Belconnen.

The purpose of the budget is to use the community's funds wisely to provide our community with the facilities and the services it needs. It is not the Government's role to line the pockets of private consultants and to destroy the community's assets. But that is what this Government has chosen to do. There are very many people in our community who will agree with me that, if this is the best the Liberal Party can do, it is not good enough. The view of the Labor Party is that this budget is a fraud upon the community.

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