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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 3 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 755 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

people in this place turn out to be hollow and unjustified. Again and again, we have heard members in this place say, "She said that she would do this", and Mrs Carnell has come back in with weasel words to explain that she did not mean what she said, again and again. That is why we have a censure motion today, Mr Speaker. That is why this motion has been moved.

The Government bleats endlessly about devaluing the currency of these motions. The only reason why the Government has been the subject of censure motions, Mr Speaker, is that they deserve it; that they are mismanaging the Territory; that they are misleading this house; that they are doing the wrong thing by the people of Canberra. That is why they get censured. Far from the problem in this place being that the Opposition devalues the censure motion, the problem in this place is that the Government devalues the whole business of government and the whole credibility of self-government in this Territory through its manifest and repeated mismanagement. Mrs Carnell is at the centre of this, because Mrs Carnell has made this Government her personal government, her personal fiefdom. She does not let Mr De Domenico, who has a lot to say today, loose on industrial relations. She tries to keep Mr Stefaniak out of the limelight. She will not let them loose on the community, because she knows what an embarrassment they are. Mrs Carnell, quite frankly, has too much on her plate, and she was not up to what she gave herself in the first place.

Mr Speaker, one of the really alarming things about Mrs Carnell's misleading in relation to the VMO contracts, her complete deception about the ability to achieve any savings from these contracts, is the fact that she has used this promise and others like it to build her claim that she has a realistic three-year budget - a three-year budget which is going to restore the finances of the Territory, which is going to bring us back into surplus, which is going to address the issues of accumulating debt. And what do we find? Not only do we find that the Auditor-General says that she is not going to get the savings from the VMO deal, but also we have Mrs Carnell revealing that her own health budget - the budget that she is personally responsible for - has blown out by $14m.

We hear that she is going to have to come back to this Assembly to borrow more money to fund her budget. She cannot pay the public servants because she has run out of money. Someone who criticised us for drawing on the Treasurer's Advance in previous years has to actually come back and ask the taxpayers to put their hands in their pockets again because she is overrunning her budget. That is the contrast. The Labor Party brought in the health budget on budget in our last year in government. Mrs Carnell has blown out her health budget by $14m in her first budget and is going to have to come back to the taxpayers to make up her shortfall. That is why this is such a serious matter. That is why we are so concerned about her deception in relation to the VMO contracts. It reflects a pattern which we see again and again from Mrs Carnell - her inability to manage and her desire to cover up her inability to manage.

Let us look at her rhetoric this morning: "It is all the unions' fault". She did not mention Laurie Brereton this morning, as she does traditionally; but this week Mrs Carnell has developed this new and fascinating line that Laurie Brereton is somehow responsible for the industrial dispute, and therefore Laurie Brereton is presumably also responsible for the budget blow-out in Health. I am sure that the Canberra community will be shocked and amazed to find that a politician who lives in Sydney has somehow been responsible for the

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