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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 1990 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

In the same debate we have to deal with the attitude of this Chief Minister. Here is a Chief Minister who, on any assessment of the budgetary performance of the ACT and reasonable expectations for the ACT economy, ought to have abandoned the old Liberal philosophies of small government and bringing down the size of the Public Service. We know that Mrs Carnell has fixed up about 1,600 jobs in the ACT since she arrived as Chief Minister.

Mrs Carnell: There are more jobs now than when we came to government. Unemployment is lower.

MR BERRY: These are public sector jobs, Mrs Carnell. If you were a responsible manager, why would you downsize the Public Service while the economy is under pressure and shrinking? Have a look at the Estimates Committee report. On page 19 it draws attention to redundancies. It states:

By the end of the current financial year the Government will have provided some $25.59m for redundancies.

These decisions were made well before the latest figures came out. The Government did not care about the damage it was going to do to the economy. All it was concerned about was the old dogma of reducing the size of the Public Service, sacking public servants and reducing the size of government. That is what this Government has been about in relation to the ACT economy. It has been an obsession with the Liberal Party, both nationally and at the Territory level, to get stuck into the Public Service. That obsession has been acted on at a time when it is least appropriate, when the economy is struggling. The Estimates Committee has properly drawn attention to an area of dreadful Government performance which deserves the strongest criticism.

One other matter that I would like to refer to in this particular debate about the Estimates Committee - and there are some others that I will deal with later on, as we get to the relevant lines - concerns comments by the Estimates Committee on the Kingston industrial site authority. They wrongly call themselves the Kingston Foreshore Development Authority. It has a nice ring to it, but it has nothing much to do with the site. When you look at the map of the land that is being exchanged for what is arguably the best site in the ACT, there is not much foreshore in it. In the Estimates Committee process I asked about the unimproved value of that parcel of Commonwealth land that is to come over to the ACT in exchange for what is arguably the best site in the Territory. Of course, the Government did not want to answer that, because to do so would have been a significant embarrassment. Their response was something like, "There is no point in our telling you that, because really the value of the land ought to be determined on its future use, not on its current use". Why not tell us what its unimproved value was at the time of the swap?

Mrs Carnell: It was worth nothing.

MR BERRY: It was because the Government was being dishonest with the people of the ACT and with this Assembly, trying to demonstrate that this indeed was a good deal when it has been shown clearly on a number of occasions that it was another dud deal by the Carnell Liberal Government.

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