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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 4 Hansard (25 June) . . Page.. 1091 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

by the political spite of the Chief Minister. As we said in the debate yesterday, we had a clear commitment from the Government that those centres would be funded for three years, and that offer was made, I would think, probably before the last election. If it was not made before the last election, it was made only shortly afterwards. Mr Speaker, you would never have thought during the last election campaign that there was any problem with the security and tenure of youth centres. Imagine the outcry, the absolute outcry, there would have been if there had been any suggestion during the election campaign that funding to those two centres was going to be cut short because the Chief Minister did not like the flavour of the words that were coming out of them. But we did not hear that. The Government did not want to talk about that either during the election campaign. But the Chief Minister did not have any problem in picking up the phone a few weeks ago and saying, "The deal is off; the funding is cut". Again, the hypocrisy of this Government is breathtaking.

Mr Speaker, the final issue, and I know this is the one that most gets up the noses of the people opposite, is the wonderful Belconnen pool. There was a very clear election commitment, a rock solid election commitment. The Belconnen pool was the major election commitment from the Liberal Party for the electorate of Ginninderra. It was trumpeted, loud and strong, by the very silent Minister for sport over there, Mr Stefaniak. Mr Speaker, what happened to that? The Government decided that they really did not want to spend that money after all. So what did they do? They dreamt up that it was in breach of national competition policy. What an absolutely amazing approach to take - to suggest that the construction of a pool for the residents of the Belconnen area could breach national competition policy! What an absolutely absurd suggestion!

Mr Smyth: But we did not. It was not us.

Mr Stefaniak: Exactly.

Mr Smyth: The community raised that issue.

MR CORBELL: It is just amazing, Mr Speaker, and well may the Government feel defensive about that. Every time we mention the Belconnen pool in this place they get a little bit jumpy, a little bit uncomfortable, and well they should because they made a commitment and they broke it, Mr Speaker. It is not in this budget.

Mr Speaker, ultimately issues surrounding this budget will need to be addressed in significant detail during the Estimates Committee meetings, and that is the appropriate place to deal with them; but the perspective that members on this side of the house have is that this is a mean and sneaky budget, not a caring and clever one. It is mean because it hits those people who can least afford to pay, and sneaky because it plays sleight-of-hand when it comes to projections of growth and when it comes to borrowing money from organisations like ACTEW by forcing them to buy the streetlights. Mr Speaker, Mr Moore may think that it was shifting borrowing from the Government to ACTEW last year and it is a clever budget this year; but we do not think so, Mr Speaker, and we will be continuing examination of the budget during the Estimates Committee process.

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