Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 2 Hansard (9 March) . . Page.. 408 ..

MR KAINE

He held it up in the planning committee for about a year, because he did not believe that it was a good deal. What is the result today? Kingston is still sitting in the pristine state that it was when we acquired it. The Government, no doubt, is spending money on it every year. The authority established has run an international design competition. It is not costing them nothing. There is an increasing expenditure, an accumulated expenditure, of public money there. In an article in the Canberra Times this morning the Chief Minister says that further development will depend on future budgets. In other words, she is contemplating somehow finding some money in this tight budget for development on the Kingston foreshore. I would put the bottom line of that as being the responsibility of the private sector, but I do not see any private sector people hammering on the door. So, what is going to be the net cost to the taxpayer of this "good deal", apart from the other side of the transaction where the Commonwealth is now proceeding to build a museum, but the shrapnel from the development and the clearing of that site remains to settle? We will not know what the cost to the taxpayer is likely to be until the coroner brings down his report. They are a couple of the very big ones and I think that we need to reflect on how good was the government decision-making in connection with all of those things.

Then, of course, we have the totally out of control health budget. It has been that way for 10 years. The Chief Minister herself was responsible, as Treasurer, for three of the last four years. She came to office on the basis that she was going to fix that. We are still waiting. The present Health Minister may or may not be able to deal with the matter. Of course, one of the other things that we do not want to see any more of is the politically opportunistic artificial retention of expenditure levels in departmental budgets to suit individuals, such as the education budget in recent years, whereby, to suit Mr Moore, who again is not here to defend his position, the budget has been artificially inflated and has to be paid for from taxes at the end of the day. What do we not want, Mr Speaker? We do not want any more of the get-rich-quick schemes, we do not want any more pandering to lobbyists, including MLAs, to keep the expenditure up in certain areas, and we do not want any more plain bad decision-making.

Mrs Carnell has made much over recent years about the clever city. How often have we heard her use that phrase? There is not much that is clever in most of the things that I just outlined when you look at the impact on the taxpayers' pocket. It is going to run into millions of dollars. We do not want any more of that. We do not want any slick deals, we do not want any incompetence in management, we do not want any political pork-barrelling, and we do not want any unilateral and costly decisions.

What do we want, then? What we want, Mr Speaker, is responsible decision-making. The Chief Minister has come up with a whole bunch of subjects that she wants discussed today. I have said before and I submit today, no member of this Assembly can possibly answer most of those questions that she has raised in an absolute sense because we are not privy to what is going on in the budget right now. We do not even know the likely outcome of this year's budget. I have seen some figures up until January. There are some rather interesting figures, as a matter of fact. I noticed that in the general government sector on the expenditure side of the budget things have changed from what

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .