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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 5 Hansard (6 May) . . Page.. 1530 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

look at these issues do, that the sensible place to put your funding is in prevention and intervention. Then we would not need so much money at the crisis end, which, as I said, is a focus of this budget.

The Minister for Education also announced major cuts to the Canberra Institute of Technology - $3m in cuts in 1999-2000, and up to $6.1m by 2002-03. He also announced the closure of the Watson campus and the relocation of that campus to Reid. These cuts have been made despite clear advice from the Assembly's Standing Committee on Education that the CIT should be funded adequately so that it can continue to provide quality programs which are responsive to the needs of industry, students and the community. The committee warned, as many people in the Australian community do, against benchmarking the CIT against the Victorian TAFE system, which clearly represents the lowest common denominator. It is once again the race to the bottom.

These cuts will have an enormous impact on class sizes, on the number of permanent teachers and on the types of vocational education and training programs; so what is the long-term social cost? What is the accruing liability we will see as a result of this particular policy position? It might make this year's budget or budgets in the next few years look good, but I am afraid we have to be very concerned when we do not see any real analysis from government of what the long-term impacts will be.

Missing from the budget, I believe, are also clear policies and funding for the indigenous community. Once again, I cannot tell you how many reports have said how important it is to fund this area. Once again, the social costs of not doing this may not be easy to quantify, but they are very obvious to everyone in Australian society, so I do not think there is any excuse at all.

The interesting thing about whether or not you put money into prevention and intervention is that it has been estimated that it takes about 15 years to start seeing results. That was put to the Education Committee when we were looking at preschools. We are not talking about a particularly long time, but it is longer than an election cycle for politicians. Maybe that is one of the problems.

I commend the Government's increased funding for services to the disabled. We have been raising this as a matter of concern for a number of years, although it appears that many of these and other new funding initiatives will have fees and charges attached.

In health generally, redundancies will help to reduce the hospital budget blow-out, as I understand it, but I wait to see exactly where they will take place. I hope that the Minister will make this a priority and ensure that staff are not left to face the burden of residual workloads that will have an impact on the patients.

As I said, I am concerned about the provision of mental health services in the ACT. It is obvious from a lot of the pre-budget submissions that there is still concern about unmet need, particularly for young people.

While we see an announcement of more money for housing, it is not new money. It is coming from sales of properties. Once again, if you read the pre-budget submissions, what is clearly needed and does not appear to be happening is a coordinated approach to

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