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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 4 Hansard (16 April) . . Page.. 943 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

The reality is that there is an $8 billion hole in the Federal Government's budget, and what we have to do here in this Assembly is ensure that the ACT and Canberra are not targeted. That has to be our bottom line, and it was the point I made to the State Premiers on Friday in Adelaide. I have asked the State Premiers to stop needless speculation for purely political purposes in their States. Nobody at last Friday's leaders forum in Adelaide was left in any doubt as to what I thought about the succession of State Premiers coming to Canberra to urge ridiculous cutbacks to the Commonwealth Public Service. Many of them were saying that they should all be here in Canberra because they certainly did not want them in their own States. The basic reason for the approach they were taking was that they did not want any cuts whatsoever in their own States.

I can assure this Assembly that I have expressed exactly the same sentiment to the Prime Minister, who has told me categorically that there are no figures at this stage. They are currently working through the departments, working through the budget, to determine what it is that they will have to do to undo the damage done by the previous Labor Government. I have told the Prime Minister that we will be doing everything in our power to ensure that whatever cuts are brought down are fair and equitable and that Canberra is not targeted, unlike those opposite and the cuts that were made under the previous Government. I think it is worth keeping in mind that some 85 per cent of Commonwealth employees are located outside the ACT. It certainly seemed to me that many of the Premiers and others had forgotten that that was the case. I have also raised with the Prime Minister's office the need for adequate compensation for the ACT, by way of increased grant funding, should cuts of any considerable magnitude to the Public Service departments here in Canberra go ahead. We are the national capital and we do have the greatest concentration of Commonwealth public servants. Clearly, that makes the ACT a special case when it comes to consideration of these matters.

That brings me to the second part of this debate, the impact of my own Government's supposed cuts. Comments were made about this crisis, the massive cuts to Commonwealth funding and the massive cuts the ACT Government has put in place. Why has there been a need, not just for me but for Ms Follett as well, to go down the path of redundancies and cuts in the ACT Government Service? It is because of the massive cuts the previous Federal Labor Government had imposed upon the ACT since self-government. This is the key underlying reason for the ACT's tight budget situation. As Ms Follett will know, since 1989 general purpose funding to the ACT from the Commonwealth has been cut by 49 per cent. That means that it has been cut in half. Once again, whom was that inflicted by? The previous Labor Government, the Federal Labor Government. Where were those opposite? Were they standing up for the ACT? They were pretty silent, Mr Speaker. The previous Government had to reduce its own expenditure because of one simple fact: The Federal Labor Government cut ACT funding in half. That is what I see as the real hypocrisy in this MPI. The Follett Labor Government went down the path of offering a total of $37.7m in redundancy payments; that is, over three years a total of 1,019 ACT public servants were retrenched through voluntary redundancies.

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