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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 2 Hansard (11 March) . . Page.. 621 ..

MR BERRY

I have been through the issue of staffing and have made it clear that the resources that are available to these Ministers make it a joke to suggest that the responsibility should be handed over to others. Of course, the Chief Minister would like everybody to come up with wild suggestions in relation to the budget so that she could wander out and take a few more 10-second media grabs, criticising them. I have no doubt that the Chief Minister will be saying time and time again, "Look, I gave them the opportunity and they couldn't come up with anything".

We always hear the rhetoric of the ACT living beyond its means, but one has to reflect on the budgets which have put us there. Many of those budgets have been the work of this Treasurer. This Treasurer should have thought of the bottom line when she played fast and loose with taxpayers' money on several occasions. Many of those have been raised throughout the period of this Assembly. The Chief Minister and Treasurer seems to think that it is her role to spend and our role to find the money - you know, the all care and no responsibility trick.

We have had an ad hoc government. Decisions are made on the hop, without consideration of the implications. Now we are being asked to provide the answers. The trouble is that the Treasurer has left us nothing but questions. We have had questions about public money spent on the failed Kinlyside deal, something which haunts this Government and will continue to do so. We have had the Minister responsible for rural residential policy in the ACT criticising himself in recent times, expressing grave concern in himself about his performance, and all of his colleagues agreeing with him, all voting for a motion which expressed grave concern in the Minister. They sit there barefaced and say, "We are competent". They do not think the Minister is competent, the Minister himself does not think he is competent, and still they go through this pretence of being able to govern the Territory.

Then, of course, we think about all of the monuments of the Chief Minister, Kate Carnell, the moving of Craft ACT into Ainslie Primary and questions about the futsal slab. We could ask further questions about what we got out of that. What did we get out of the futsal slab? We made a donation to the futsal people. The Chief Minister went to Rio de Janeiro. We saw her on television, wandering the streets of Rio de Janeiro with one of her staff members and the head of her department, and she came back and the result of it was a futsal slab. I do not know anybody in the Territory who would be too happy about that. That is an example of the way that this Chief Minister and this Government have steered the Territory.

Sure, people will say that the futsal slab cost only a small amount of money. It started off as a very small amount of money, but it grew. I think the quotes were $80,000 to start with. It ended up costing about $250,000 and every time somebody uses it they have to spend another $30,000. For example, it was used for futsal. I think the last game of the first tournament was washed out because the slab really needed a roof over it. Then players were dissatisfied with the surface because they used to suffer injury, so a $30,000 mat was put on it to make it safer and then stored away when they were not using it. I rather think it should be checked for silverfish at the moment because it has been stored away for a long time.

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