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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (25 May) . . Page.. 1813 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

Labor will always focus its efforts on ensuring that the public education system receives a priority and remains strong and viable. We will work cooperatively with the community, its representatives and the unions to achieve our education aims.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the normal regional development strategy framework covered rural areas or urban centres in depressed regions. More recently, the focus of regional development has shifted to urban industrial centres with significant structural unemployment. In the former, the goal was pure development, while in the latter the goal is one of redevelopment. The ACT fits neither model. On the one hand, the ACT has a reasonably well-developed, though ageing, infrastructure and, as shown in the last three years, its workforce is both flexible and mobile. A regional development strategy for the ACT would thus differ from usual strategies in that it would not be targeted at either pure development or redevelopment.

Essentially, a coherent regional economic development strategy for the ACT and region has to have a focus on improving regional employment opportunities by building on competitive strengths and creating a more favourable climate for small to medium enterprises, encouraging the creation of new business, and consolidating and improving local infrastructure.

There is a point of agreement between Labor and the government over the need to develop, around the airport, a regional transport hub. The arrival of Impulse Airlines, and the injection into the territory's economic base should the venture prove successful, is a great start. But there is more to be done and not all of it can come from the private sector. Much of the infrastructure has to be provided by government, and the drive to get it done and the strategic planning are certainly the province of government.

Labor will continue its process of comprehensive policy development over the months leading to next year's election.

Mr Speaker, I said earlier that this is a budget written on the back of an envelope. It might be more apt to say that it is written on the back of 150 envelopes-the redundancy payments for the next round of public servants to lose their jobs. The Treasurer and the Minister for Urban Services, where most of the redundancies are sourced, can sidestep all they want. It is written in their budget papers-another 150 redundancies.

Overridingly, this is a budget of lost opportunities. That fact is particularly marked in a year when it is easy to be Treasurer-a year when the budget could have been written by a drover's dog. It is a budget of lost opportunities because of what is not in it. There is no plan for the future, there is no vision, and there are no ideas. It is a budget that, instead, records a wasted windfall and a lack of strategic planning so pronounced that it provides unallocated funds for use at a single minister's discretion.

It is a budget whose centrepiece is an underfunded, plagiarised social theory that tries to reinvent the Chief Minister-a centrepiece designed more to revive a faded political career than to address the areas of need so neglected for so long by this declining government.

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