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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 4 Hansard (8 May) . . Page.. 1163 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

The distortion tricks go down to the very smallest of tricks, like today's tricks, and I think Mr Humphries should be ashamed of himself. The day that the Leader of the Opposition and others are delivering their replies to the budget, what does he do? He accepts the folly of the Government's decision on a previous occasion and he pulls a stunt - not just one stunt but two stunts. First of all, he goes out and says, "Instead of listening to a response from the Leader of the Opposition, instead of listening to responses on the budget, we are going to kill 1,000 little Skippies". That is clearly going to get a bit of attention.

Then what are we going to do? Apart from 1,000 Skippies, we are also going to back down completely on a stupid piece of policy that we made before. Do you remember the distortions associated with that? Oh, no! And there are distortions again today. They are a government of distortions. It was a wonderful policy. It was going to save small business. But, today, when they do not want to hear the replies to the budget, they set it up.

Mr Humphries: This is nonsense.

MR MOORE: Mr Humphries stands there - - -

MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! You may not interject at all, and certainly not when standing.

MR MOORE: Mr Humphries stands there, embarrassed about these distortions. They are frightened of the replies to the budget. They are frightened of being exposed. That is what has happened. They are being exposed for their distortion, exposed for exaggerating, exposed for attempting to present a budget which is about passing funds over to their friends and trying to distort it to be a jobs budget, which it is not.

Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, one of the difficulties I have in replying to this budget is that I am conscious that some of the underlying problems have been caused and not resolved by five years of Labor government, and by 13 years of Labor government federally. The cause of our present malaise is their ideological abandonment of service to the community in favour of economic rationalism - they, too, are the eco-rats - and concessions to private interests. One of the difficulties is that, even though I find this budget a distortion, I find all the problems with it and I have listened to Mr Whitecross, I just do not think things would be any better under a Labor government.

MR OSBORNE (3.45): Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, for some time now I have been wondering why this year the Chief Minister did not extend an invitation to me to have some input into this budget. Over the previous two budgets, I was invited in. However, this time I was overlooked, for some reason. I have to say that I have been grateful for those opportunities, over the last couple of years, to have some input; but there was no invitation this year, and I have been getting more and more suspicious. After looking through the budget on Tuesday, I now know that there are at least three reasons why. I will take each of these points in turn.

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