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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 1992 ..

Mr Stanhope: You have lost it.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, I have had a wall of interjections from members opposite. I hope that they would be courteous enough to listen. This budget delivers on a range of community-based objectives which, when we came to office five years ago, we said we would dedicate ourselves to achieving.

Mr Stanhope: Like a thousand beds at the Canberra Hospital? That promise?

MR SPEAKER: Be quiet, Mr Stanhope. You have asked your question.

MR HUMPHRIES: I believe for that reason-

Mr Stanhope: Like the Belconnen pool?

MR HUMPHRIES: We have achieved a level of-

Mr Stanhope: Free bus fares for school kids? That promise?

MR SPEAKER: Order please, Mr Stanhope! If you would like to listen to the rest of the answer, I suggest you stop injecting.

MR HUMPHRIES: This opposition has tried all sorts of lines on this budget. They have said that it is a budget that is the product of good luck; that we have had good luck from things like windfalls from the Commonwealth, from the GST-as Mr Stanhope reminds me-and from all sorts of different sources. We have not had especially good luck. If anything, the government has manufactured its good luck for this budget. The evidence of that fact is not what I might say today to the Assembly or the lines that the opposition or the government might use about this budget. The proof is in what the Labor opposition has had to say about the present ACT government's budgeting over the last five years.

If you look at the budgets we have brought down in each for the last five years, you will see a litany of complaints from the opposition about the way in which we have approached the task of reducing outlays, increasing revenue and bridging the gap between what we earn and what we want to spend as a community. Every year, we have had that criticism. Every year, we have been told that we are mean and nasty and that we are not looking at the interests of the ACT community because we have not addressed needs in the broader community.

That five years of difficult decision-making have led to the budget position we have attained today-to the surplus we have attained and to the extra spending in health, in education, in community policing, in road infrastructure and a whole host of areas where the dividends of hard work, not of good luck, have paid off.

On an earlier occasion I debunked the myth that the ACT had simply got a windfall from the Grants Commission. The majority of the amount we earned in the Grants Commission-earned, not won or had fall in our lap-was based not on sitting back and waiting for the downturn of the last five years to cut in.

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