Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (13 May) . . Page.. 1251 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

There is no doubt what the intent of the budget is, and I believe it achieves that. Mr Whitecross talks about making $5m more available for jobs, and I will deal with that in more detail later. This budget, in fact, makes $7.7m available for jobs - $4.5m of it through the Jobs Fund, aimed specifically at job creation; the other $3.2m through continuing labour market programs and economic initiatives designed to boost business and, through that, to generate jobs. The $5m that Mr Whitecross is proposing is relatively minuscule, and I will deal with that again shortly. I believe that it is a good budget. I repeat: The Opposition has not successfully attacked it in any substantive way.

Probably the strongest argument against it was made by Mr Wood when he talked about taking money from ACTEW, but that can be justified on any grounds at all as being fair and equitable. ACTEW has a substantial amount of accumulated profits, taxpayers' money, which it does not need now and will not need in the future. It is a healthy trading operation and its ability to continue to trade and compete will not in any way be affected by asking it to repay to the people of Canberra the surplus profits that it has been holding ever since it was corporatised. There is nothing in that decision that will materially affect the ability of ACTEW to do its job in the future. It helps us deal with today's problem, and that is what the Government has to deal with from year to year - today's problems, not last year's problems or next year's problems.

I would like to deal with Mr Whitecross's rather poor rebuttal of the budget. There are a lot of words there, a lot of rhetoric; but, when you get to the bottom of it, it is hollow and it means nothing. Mr Whitecross began by saying:

If there was ever a time when the ACT economy needed a solution, a long-term strategic response to the difficulties it faces, it is now.

Did Mr Whitecross offer such a solution, did he make any contribution at all to the solution of the problems that he saw were currently confronting the ACT? He did not. If it is a time for response, where is the Labor Party's response? I would like to have heard from Mr Whitecross - and the electorate out there is entitled to know - what he would be doing to address these problems, because they are going to have to make a decision in the very near future anyway. But he did not come clean on what he thinks should be done.

He did, however, raise the question of Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland budgeting, which he then expanded upon. Clearly, that is the Labor Party's approach to budgeting - the Wizard of Oz approach or the Alice in Wonderland approach. He said:

We must diversify our economic core to survive.

This Government has been working on that problem for the last two years and continues to work on it, but how does Mr Whitecross intend to address the problem? He is silent on the issue, no clues at all. "We must diversify to survive", he says, and there it stops. I suggest that is the totality of what the Labor Party has to say on that issue.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .