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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 1 Hansard (22 February) . . Page.. 205 ..

MS FOLLETT (continuing):

been sacked because they were salaried doctors. The Melba Health Centre has been closed. There are no new nursing homes in Tuggeranong and Belconnen. That was a promise to the ageing people of Canberra. Is it any wonder that those nursing homes have not been provided, given that they were to be funded from the sale of Jindalee which was privatised for the abysmally low return to the Canberra community of $210,000/

There has been no increase in funding for policing, despite the promise and also despite the rhetoric and scaremongering of Mr Humphries. His excuse was that the Police Commissioner had not asked for any extra money. I would ask: What sort of a way is that to run the government? You make a promise at election time and then you blame the public servants because they did not actually come to you and ask you to implement your own policy. As I said, I believe that this is gross waste and mismanagement. The Liberals' arts policy for the election has been dumped. Again, it was Mr Humphries who did the big dump. Mr Humphries promised $3m over three years to the arts community. The Canberra Times writer, who is normally quite a fan of Mr Humphries - that was my impression anyway - says that the arts community will be lucky to get $1m over three years. Groups are already being told to seek funding from the Health Promotion Fund. There is a clear recognition that the Government has no intention of fulfilling its commitment.

In the Liberals' promises on the ACT government service, the Government promised to "guarantee security of tenure for all public servants not employed on a contract basis". But what they have done, of course, is put involuntary redundancies in the new enterprise bargaining packages; that is, the Government wants the right to sack public servants. So much for security of tenure, which was the election promise. Staff newsletter No. 15 of yesterday says that there will be 100 involuntary redundancies.

In the business and economic development policy document at the last election we saw the real George Bush promise, the read my lips promise. The exact wording was, "No tax or charge will exceed their New South Wales counterparts". That was the promise from the Liberals in their own words. The club industry has learnt that a Liberal promise is not worth the paper that it is written on. Poker machine tax in the ACT is now one per cent higher than it is in New South Wales. Worse still, the industry was forced to accept this broken promise by being threatened that, if they did not, the casino and pubs and taverns would be given poker machines in order to force the clubs into submission. That is what the Liberals call consultation; that is their idea of consultation.

Even the business community cannot rely on the party that many of them regard as their own. In the Liberals' election promises, payroll tax was to be reduced from 7 per cent to 6 per cent. This never happened, and of course it never will. The Liberal Government in fact adopted the ALP policy - and a good move, too - of increasing the threshold on payroll tax. It implemented the previously announced ALP policy of raising the threshold from $550,000 to $600,000 on 1 January this year. There is a further promise to the business community that the threshold will go to $800,000 on 1 January next year. Frankly, if I were a business operator in Canberra, I would certainly not base my cash flow and profit projections on that promise.

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