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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 4 Hansard (25 June) . . Page.. 1093 ..

MR OSBORNE (continuing):

During the election campaign I repeatedly called on the Government to address the overspending in education administration, and I am glad to see that they have done that. Of course, my calls were greeted with the usual hysteria from special interest groups who twisted my words and said that I was launching an attack on education - that I wanted to close schools and slash spending. It was not true, of course, but I do not expect those particular lobby groups to be concerned with the truth. What I said in the campaign was that spending on education administration in the ACT had ballooned and there was plenty of evidence to support that statement. I said that, where it was in the interests of schools in the same area to amalgamate, they should be given financial incentives to do so. I never said once that I supported wholesale school closures.

The overspending in education administration is a matter of public record. The 1997 report of the Steering Committee on Government Service Provision shows that the ACT has the highest out of school education costs per student of any jurisdiction in Australia apart from the Northern Territory. It also shows that those costs have risen steadily each year since 1992. In 1995 it was reported that it would have been cheaper for the Government to have paid for all the Territory's children to go to Grammar than to go through its own schools. Mr Speaker, as I said in the campaign, I am happy for the Territory to spend proportionally more on education than other jurisdictions as long as that money is spent on teaching kids. My line on education for the campaign was taking money out of the boardroom and putting it back into the classroom. After my experience in the campaign I understand how much heat and how little light can be generated by daring to suggest that education bear its fair share of the burden, so I congratulate the Government on biting the bullet in this area.

My concerns about the budget being too clever by half revolve around the growth forecasts. Let us not be mistaken. As a large part of the Government's attack on the operating loss revolves around the growth forecasts, these assumptions are fundamental to the long-term success of the strategy. I said on budget day that I considered the growth forecasts heroic, and I see little reason to withdraw from that position. The Government is predicting that the ACT economy will grow at a rate of 3.6 per cent a year over the next three years. By comparison, the Federal Government is predicting that Australia's economy will grow by only 3 per cent a year, and there are signs that that forecast will be rocked by the deepening financial crisis in Asia. If the recession in Japan gets any worse, those projections for growth in Australia could be completely blown out of the water.

To put those two sets of figures into some kind of context, Mr Speaker, it should be noted that the ACT growth has been tracking behind the Australian growth forecasts since 1994-95. So, according to the Government, we will not only catch up with the Australian growth rate this year, but we will pass it. According to the Government, we will leap from growth of 1.4 per cent a year to a very respectable 3.6 per cent a year and sustain that over the next three years. I heard the Chief Minister yesterday explaining why we would reach this level of growth, and I hope for all our sakes that she is right.

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