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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 2 Hansard (27 February) . . Page.. 306 ..

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister) (11.36): Mr Speaker - - -

An incident having occurred in the gallery -

MR SPEAKER: The sitting is suspended until the ringing of the bells.

MRS CARNELL: Mr Speaker, I think this debate has been very interesting because of the level of hypocrisy that has been shown, particularly by those opposite. As everybody who has been in this Assembly for any length of time will know, reductions in the amount of money we spend on education in real terms have been part of ACT budgets virtually since self-government. Why has that been the case, Mr Speaker? The reason is that the Commonwealth Grants Commission, for better or for worse, has assessed that the ACT Government is overspending on education every year. In fact, the Commonwealth Grants Commission expenditure assessments, based on 1993-94 figures, indicated that on a standardised basis the ACT was supposedly overspending by some $46.28m in the area of education. The reality is that when we put the last budget together we said that we did not agree with that. We said that education had to be above those sorts of cuts. In a purely economic rational approach we would have just taken the Commonwealth Grants Commission at face value and cut the guts out of education; but we did not do that, because we promised not to and also because we do not believe that it is the right thing to do.

What did we do? We did exactly what we promised that we would do. We increased education funding from the budget of the previous year by, in real terms, $7.7m, or 4 per cent, which was the CPI figure we used in last year's budget. On top of that there was an increase of $2m for enrolment adjustments and another $4.7m for additional functions. That got us to an appropriation level of $206.6m. But it does not stop there, Mr Speaker. As we have a three-year budget, that figure goes to $211.9m in 1996-97 and to $218.1m in 1997-98.

Certainly, there have been some arguments in this place and in the community about the untraded-off teachers' salary increase given by the previous Government literally weeks before the last election. They gave teachers a salary increase without any thought about what it would do to budget levels, without any thought about what it would do to functions, class sizes or any of the other things that should be bottom line - I agree with Mr Moore - in terms of educational outcomes. If they had had a look at that, if they had bothered about funding that increase, then of course we would not have had a problem; but they did not. They just shoved it in, supposedly, as an election sweetener without there being any capacity for whichever government won last March to handle it.

The reality is that it is not just us. Anybody in this job right now would have had an enormous amount of trouble coming up with more than we did for education. In fact, if you remember, Mr Speaker, prior to the last election the education lobby groups tried to get the previous Government to give the commitment we did - CPI, in real terms - and they refused to give that undertaking. Why? The reason was that every year before that they had not done that. Not only did we do that, but in the

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