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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 5 Hansard (6 May) . . Page.. 1554 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

My colleague Mr Corbell has talked about the interest on the loan to the Department of Urban Services for redundancies. As indicated, $2.2m has to be paid in interest. There are only two ways to pay this sum. One is through more job losses and the other is through decreased services. Why did you not say how the Department of Urban Services is going to find the monthly repayments of interest? I note in the ownership agreement for the Department of Urban Services that the annual interest payments are as little as $38,500 in 2004-05 but as high as $326,500 in the coming year, rising to $696,500 in 2000-01. At $40,000 a year, that is equivalent to eight jobs in 1999-2000 and over 17 jobs in 2000-01. Why did you not tell us about that? So much for the full-monty budget; so much for revealing all. I do not have confidence that this budget will deliver any comfort to the average family in Canberra. It will only, through pain, loss of jobs, increased charges, greater uncertainty, deliver comfort to the big end of town. It is not a full-monty budget; it is a Monty Python budget.

MR BERRY (9.39): The first thing I want to refer to in speaking to this budget is some comments that have been made generally by government members. One that I found surprising came from Mr Smyth when he talked about the social fabric and how important it was. Of course, we all would agree with that. But then I thought about it in the context of the budget and I found it difficult to work out how new pistols and capsicum sprays for the police and a party at the end of the year would add to the social fabric in the Territory. If you put in those sorts of issues and other shortfalls, the social fabric would not be enhanced by this budget.

The budget has already been shown as a sham by my colleagues who have spoken on their various portfolio areas. In particular, the claims of the Chief Minister and Treasurer about how she is a better manager as she was able to spirit away $300m from ACTEW - the ACTEW saved by the Assembly - and claim it as her own, just shows how boastful she can get and how brazen she can be in respect of her performance in the ACT. The people of the ACT know that she has cheated on them. She attempted to cheat them of their electricity authority. Before the last election there was no sign of this authority being stolen, but at the very first opportunity this rationalist Chief Minister attempted to cheat on them and spirit away their public authority and use it for her own purposes. The same Chief Minister has taken the same approach to the $300m which she has taken from ACTEW. She has attempted to demonstrate that it was her contribution to the management of the budget.

Mr Corbell: And you voted for it, Mr Moore.

Mr Moore: I am proud of it, Simon. I am proud of it.

Mr Corbell: Mr Moore says that he is proud of voting for the sale of ACTEW.

MR BERRY: Mr Moore would be proud of voting for the sale of ACTEW because Mr Moore is rusted onto this lot over there, but I will get to him later. I have a few things to say about Mr Moore.

The next thing that we have to deal with is the jobs that will go from the ACT Public Service as a result of this budget. The Chief Minister announced that 450 jobs would be going out of the place. We discovered that the heartless Mr Smyth had agreed to the

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