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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (25 May) . . Page.. 1817 ..

MR RUGENDYKE (continuing):

Mr Speaker, there are some good aspects of this budget, but there are also some principles to stand by.

MS TUCKER (3.50): I will not speak at length today, either, as I have not had time to go through all the detail of the budget, but I will make some general comments. We have had time to look in some detail at the environment budget.

This government is telling us that it has succeeded in good governance because it has produced a surplus. Of course, we do need to have responsible management of the finances of the territory, but the statement that I have been making in this Assembly for the Greens since I was elected is that we want to make sure that the focus on the financial bottom line is balanced by a focus on the social and environmental issues related to our society. In other words, we cannot see the society and the environment as externalities in the framework in which we work.

Of interest to me is that, as other members have mentioned, in this budget we are seeing a very strong focus on the need to look at the social aspect through the use of the term "social capital". I think that this commenced in the last budget. I seem to recall Mrs Carnell saying, "Now that the books are in order, we can look at the social issues." The fundamental problem with that is that it was in a way an acknowledgment that they had been neglected for the previous four years and liabilities have been accruing in those areas.

We do work under an accrual method of accounting which takes into account liabilities related to financial matters, but we also accrue other sorts of liabilities, such as social and environmental liabilities. They must be equally important and powerful in the analysis that we bring to how well any government is doing.

As I said, this government is now claiming that it has the books in order, so it can address the social issues. We can see many times in the budget speech and papers the use of the words "social capital", as if somehow the frequency of use of those words will convince us that this government actually understands the concept of social capital. I understand that it is very post-modern to pick up accepted concepts and rework them, and I think that we have a bit of a post-modern government here. But if you look closely at the basics of this government's budget, you will see that they do not fit in with what some of us understand the concept of social capital to embrace.

There are some very obvious indicators in their budget approach which would suggest that they have reworked the idea of what social capital means. For example, if you look at the key result areas, you will see reference to the introduction of a more contestable public sector. Eva Cox, for example, has done a number of Boyer Lectures on civil society. I will quote one of her statements:

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