Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 9 Hansard (23 November) . . Page.. 2454 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

who are meant to be accountable to the people, are going to take an interest in. Let someone else decide. It is not our problem". Again and again as we went through the Urban Services budget, Mr Speaker, we found that Mr De Domenico just did not know; he just had not thought about the changes he was going to make.

We asked about the changes he wanted to make to driver training. He said, "It has been very successful in South Australia". We said, "Show us the evaluation about how successful it has been in South Australia". He said, "Oh, well, they have not done any evaluation, but they reckon it is pretty good". Again and again we have this notion. Even where they are making reforms which have been made elsewhere, they do not seem to understand how to go about it. They want to expose the Survey Office to competition from the private sector, but they do not know how to go about the business of opening up a government agency to competition. They want to drop the axe on 1 July and open the Survey Office up for competition without giving it the chance to adjust to a competitive environment and without giving their clients a chance to adjust to the business of - - -

Mr Humphries: They have six months to do that.

MR WHITECROSS: That shows how much you know about what your comrade is doing, Mr Humphries. That is not what he is doing. Mr Speaker, another way that we are seeing savings being made in this budget is by cutbacks in apprentice intakes. We are seeing this Government, and in particular Urban Services, abandoning its role in the training of new apprentices. It just does not employ them. It is not a role that this Government thinks it should be undertaking, whereas, traditionally, the government has played a significant role in providing employment and training for young people, for both the government sector and the private sector. Now we see a situation where they are not taking on apprentices in the way that we did under Labor. Instead, they are reducing the skill levels of the entire work force by not performing the role the government traditionally has in this regard.

Another element which I will briefly mention, Mr Speaker, is the offsets in the budget in the way of the sale of goods and services and the sale of capital stock, which forms an integral part of the amount of money which they think they need to run Urban Services. There are two key examples of this which show the misguided nature of what they are doing. The first is the taxi auction. They budgeted $3m for the taxi auction. They got only $2.4m. They are $600,000 under this year. Mrs Carnell's three-year budget is even further out when we get to the outyears. We have $22m budgeted for the privatisation of ACT Fleet. Mr De Domenico thought it was so secret that he could not explain to us what the benefit to the ACT would be of that privatisation. All he could say was, "Oh, well, everybody else is doing it, so it must be a good idea". He could not show us the numbers. He could not justify his position. That is why the Estimates Committee recommended that the Public Accounts Committee pick this up. If, as I expect, the Public Accounts Committee has doubts about this, then that is $22m which is in the Government's three-year budget but which they will need to find from somewhere, Mr Speaker, on top of the $600,000 they have already lost for this year on the taxi plates. They are just some of the things, Mr Speaker. The range of cuts in services and increases in taxes and charges which underpin this budget is really quite serious and should be of concern to the whole community.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .