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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 1 Hansard (20 February) . . Page.. 61 ..

MS FOLLETT (continuing):

appropriate that the Assembly should debate such matters and make judgments on such matters. That is why we are here. In looking at an even-handed approach, members must not delude themselves that as MLAs we are also in charge of the union movement. We are not. We are in this Assembly to judge the matters for which the Assembly is responsible, and making judgments about the Government is one of those matters.

I want to go through some of the other issues that have been raised in the course of the debate. Mrs Carnell throughout her comments again gave this Assembly absolutely no indication that she would enter into anything other than confrontation, and she said it again all through her comments by way of interjection. What Mrs Carnell ought to do, in my opinion, is to withdraw the threats she has made to remove payroll deductions of union dues from 7 March. That is a serious threat to the trade union movement, and it is an extremely discriminatory threat as well. Mrs Carnell should also remove her threat to reduce the offer that is being made to unions by 0.15 per cent. That was an act not so much of confrontation as of outright provocation. It was an act of provocation. In the midst of an attempted negotiation, for the Government to reduce its offer like that was, I believe, a straight-out provocation.

I attempted, in my comments earlier in the debate, to indicate that the expenditure by government is a matter of the Government's priorities, and I think that case has been proven. But through you, Mr Speaker, I would like to ask Mr Moore and Mr Osborne, who insist that they cannot influence the Government on this matter, how much they think they voted for in the budget for pay increases. How much do they think it was? They cannot answer that question, because it is not there, because necessarily the Government's budget has a large amount of flexibility built into it. Quite apart from the Government deciding between priorities - priorities like $40,000 pay increases for chief executive officers, priorities like spending the whole $15m on removing the buildings on Acton Peninsula, priorities like spending $7m on consultants - quite apart from those allocational priorities, there must be flexibility within the budget. If that flexibility is not there, how then is the Government going to pay for the expected $10m blow-out in the health budget? We did not appropriate that through the Assembly. Mr Moore and Mr Osborne did not say, "You might need an extra $10m, so we had better vote for it". They did not do that.

Mr Moore: We did - the Treasurer's Advance. Do you not understand the budget, Rosemary? I would have thought you understood it by now.

MS FOLLETT: No, you did not. We do expect that that money will be found, and indeed it ought to be. We have not heard from Mrs Carnell that she is going to have to close the doors of the hospital because the health budget is blowing out. We have not heard that she is going to stop paying all the VMOs because the health budget is blowing out. Of course there must be that flexibility within the budget process, and there is. We heard Mr Humphries say earlier that he was very pleased to get $5m for the site at Conder. (Extension of time granted)

Mrs Carnell also complained in her comments - and it was a real complaint, yet another big whinge, blaming someone else - that the unions have taken the umpire out of the equation; that is, they have gone for a section 170 application. This Chief Minister represents a party whose Federal policy is to take the umpire out forever.

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