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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 5 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 1446 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

plans, when the businesses promoting the event had finalised their brochures, when people had already booked, when magazines had already been published. It is another disaster. It was poorly thought through, poorly planned and it could undermine a successful event. Meanwhile, the poor Canberra taxpayer is made to pay twice.

The business incentive scheme has already come under scrutiny and been criticised by the Assembly's Public Accounts Committee in 1997. There seems to be no improvement in the picture this year. The proposals supported are just as unsubstantiated as those assessed by the Public Accounts Committee. We have found, once again, that there was no way that the committee could scrutinise the operation of the business incentive scheme and judge whether it was successful and whether taxpayers were getting value for the money they invest in the scheme. We were also again treated to the commercial-in-confidence claim to ensure that committee members could not gain access to this information.

Inquiries in the tourism area have yielded a trifecta of duds and raised a series of questions about the processes and decision-making of the Government. First, we had a plane that does not fly. Then there was a tennis match on the futsal slab that cost $33,000. We got that after the Chief Minister and her senior staff went to a social event in Sydney. The third dud of course was the discredited Feel the Power campaign. Between them they tell us a lot about this Government - people who play fast and are loose with taxpayers' money; people who think it is a lark to spend $30,000 on a whim, without seeking any advice; people who think that it is all right to direct ACT Forests, which does not make a profit, to spend $6,000 and then to have no paperwork to support it. These are the people who committed the ACT to a $500,000 dud campaign to promote a despised slogan. These are the people who backed that up with another $500,000 in this year's budget. The Chief Minister's incursions into tourism and promotion are the efforts of a person out of touch, out of her depth and out of control.

I turn to all those election promises, all those reassurances, that education will be maintained in real terms. What a con! Not only has there been a cut but also education has to help plug the Carnell black hole. The Chief Minister is borrowing from our children's future to pay for her bright ideas in tourism. There is a strong case for Mr Moore to vote against this budget, but I will bet he can rationalise black with white on this one as well.

Mr Speaker, a good example of the problems in health is the debacle of the Federal waiting list money. It was announced before the election, it was reiterated after the election and we have seen media release after media release about what a good deal it was. The Federal Health Minister kept telling us how lucky we were to get all this waiting list money, but it did not go to reducing waiting lists. It did not go to reducing the pain and suffering of those on waiting lists. When we asked during the committee hearings what it was spent on, we were told, "Instruments". Our waiting list money went because the hospital system was unable to plan for the proper replacement of surgical instruments. It was used to replace old instruments because the Government had not allocated sufficient money for equipment. Eight hundred people on the waiting list have

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