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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 5 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 1452 ..

MS CARNELL: And what was the answer? The answer is that we do not pay any money.

Mr Berry: How do they get it then?

MS CARNELL: They take if off our FAGs payment, so we do not ever get it actually.

Mr Moore: You had better tell him what the FAGs payment is.

MS CARNELL: It is the financial assistance grants payment. I should have been much more specific. Mr Speaker, you can really see Mr Howard going to Bob Carr and saying, "Now, Bob, I want you to pay $200m. Could I please have the cheque?". What would Bob Carr have done? Would he have said, "Sorry, John, piss off."? I am sure he would not have said that. He might have actually! Mr Speaker, what he would have said was: "No, I am not going to pay". That is exactly what we and every other State said. As I have said time and again, we do not pay it; it is taken off our FAGs - our financial assistance grants payment. So why on earth have they said again that the way they would have found the money was by not paying back the money? They knew that the money was not to be paid back.

Mr Corbell got up in this place yesterday and took a point of order that he did support the Business Development Fund and that it was horrifying for me to have suggested that he did not. In your report you suggest that we spend the $2m allocated for the Business Development Fund to somehow fund other things in the budget. Yesterday Mr Corbell stood up and said, "Of course we support the Business Development Fund", but you support using the money somewhere else. You cannot have it both ways. It is also one-off expenditure; it is not recurrent.

The Opposition have also not supported the Bruce Stadium development. Quite seriously, for anyone in this place to rule a line through Olympic soccer for Canberra, to rule a line through the Raiders, the Brumbies and the Cosmos in this city, is simply unacceptable, but that is what they have done. But, most importantly, Mr Speaker, it is capital expenditure. I know that I will never get this through Mr Berry's head, but it is one-off expenditure. You cannot use it as recurrent or you would have to find another Bruce Stadium next year. You cannot use it the way they have which shows, again, the chair of our Estimates Committee not only did not ask very many questions about the budget but also does not know the difference between cash accounting, recurrent accounting, capital expenditure and other one-off expenditure. He wants to use capital expenditure to fund recurrent - - -

Mr Berry: Oh, dear!

MS CARNELL: That is what you said in the report, Mr Berry. Mr Speaker, the concern with this report is that, in the few areas where questions were asked and answers were given, the committee has totally ignored the answers. For example, concerning superannuation payments, the issue was explained at length and was explained

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