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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2230 ..
MR QUINLAN (continuing):
to us increasing taxes." In the main, what the Labor Party has objected to is how you have administered taxes and not necessarily the taxation level at all. It is not unusual for Mr Humphries or Ms Carnell to misquote this side of the house, to build a straw man and then attack it with great vigour.
Mr Humphries: What is the true story?
MR QUINLAN: I will give you an example. One of the taxes that we objected to was the emergency services levy. This tax has been an outstanding embarrassment to this government. It is a tax that was vigorously defended for 12 months by this government; a tax that was called a levy but is actually a tax because the funds were not immediately applied to increasing emergency services within the territory. It is simply a tax. As a tax it has caused significant embarrassment and as a tax it is now intended to be withdrawn. It is those sorts of taxes that we have objected to. The pressure that we apply from this side of the house brings about some commonsense to government from time to time, Mr Humphries.
Mr Humphries: So it is your responsibility that we have had to-
MR QUINLAN: Absolutely. This is the area that sits at the centre of the budget. Labor is very pleased to see the ACT economy improve. But in the main the ACT economy has improved while this government has been stuffing up other things like the Bruce Stadium and CanDeliver. Most of the things that this government has its direct fingerprints on are failures. It is hard to remember an enterprise that this government has got its fingerprints on that has not been something of a disaster, and this is a commentary on the performance of this government.
Debate interrupted in accordance with standing order 74 and the resumption of the debate made an order of the day for a later hour.
MR STANHOPE: My question is to the Minister for Health and Community Care. On 5 May, the minister announced that the government would issue tenders for the provision of additional elective surgery in an attempt to address burgeoning waiting lists at Canberra's public hospitals. The minister said that the government would consider bids from the private sector as well as from public hospitals and that up to $7 million would be available, money held over from bonus payments made to the territory when it signed up early to the Medicare agreement in 1998. In the event, on Tuesday of this week the minister announced that tenders worth $3 million had been let.
Can the minister say what happened to the other $4 million? Why has it taken him 21/2 years to spend the windfall from the Commonwealth on what is one of the most pressing problems in the health system? Are the new contracts written in such a way that
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