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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 5 Hansard (26 August) . . Page.. 1390 ..

MS CARNELL (continuing):

have the same requirements, but you cannot just say it is all right and we will not question it, as Mr Wood did. It is a nice entity and we do not want to take on a noisy, minority group. But the fact is that this side of the house will always ensure that taxpayers' money is being spent appropriately, whether or not the group involved is going to write lots of letters, because that is our job.

What have we done in the arts as well as ask the institute to be transparent, to be accountable and to be efficient in the services they offer the ACT Government and the ACT people? Over the last three years, when Mr Humphries was Minister for Arts, we spent over $22m on arts facilities. What did Mr Wood do? A big nothing. It is all very well for Mr Wood to say, "Shock, horror, we have cut $800,000 from the institute". It was not $1.6m. What did Mr Wood do? He did not build the Canberra Museum and Gallery. He just rolled it over, rolled it over and rolled it over and did not do it. He did not make the decisions. What happened with the Tuggeranong Community Cultural Centre? Nothing. There was $1.8m rolled over, rolled over, rolled over, rolled over. What happened about the new Playhouse? Nothing. It required us to come to government to do things that had been on the agenda for the whole time that Mr Wood had been Minister for the Arts. That does not indicate to me that Mr Wood was a Minister for the Arts out there doing things for the arts community, as he is trying to pretend.

Since we have been in government, as I said, we have spent $22.1m on arts facilities. It is actually more than that, but that is a minimum. That is the bottom line. We provided $7.7m for the Canberra Museum and Gallery, $1.8m for the Tuggeranong Community Cultural Centre, $8.6m for the new Playhouse, and the ACT contribution to the National Gallery was $2m. There was the upgrading of the Canberra Theatre, the performing arts complex at Hawker College, refurbishment of the Erindale Theatre, the Belconnen Community Centre theatre and hall upgrade, and many other arts and heritage facility upgrades. We provided $22.1m.

I think Mr Wood and others have made the comment: "Shock, horror, this is a government that is spending money on Bruce Stadium". I have to say that we are not spending $22.1m. We are spending not much more than half of that.

The fact is that this Government has been committed to the arts. Even in the budget this year we are spending nearly $11m on our commitment to the arts generally. But, where we are spending it we know the outcomes; we know what we are getting for our dollars. What we are not doing is funding excessive administration and very large travel budgets.

Mr Wood said that he had seen a list that showed that what the institute was providing to the ACT was worth heaps more than $1.6m. I have to say that in that list that he was referring to there were such great figures as $241,180 for services to ACT community arts organisations. That is so that teachers at the institute can be on community arts boards. Heavens! Nobody else is paid to do that, yet they want $240,000 so that members at the institute, who you would assume would be committed to the arts and would want to be involved in community arts boards and so on, can be on those entities. That is just one of the many, many figures. I do not think it is fair for me to run through them at this stage, although I could, and many of them are more embarrassing than that.

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