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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2298 ..

Mr Stanhope: The point, Mr Speaker, is that Mr Moore did retract and apologise for statements he made because they were wrong. I retract "lies he told" and say "those vicious statements that he made".

MR SPEAKER: Thank you. Sit down.

Mr Stanhope: For which he had to apologise.

MR SPEAKER: Sit down. You have retracted.

MR MOORE: Mr Stanhope's rendition of that is also patently false. I very clearly retracted the words said, insofar as anybody had misinterpreted the words said. I have never retracted the statement, and the peers of Dr Jeans have written a report that shows that the allegations of Dr Jeans are patently false.

Mr Stanhope: So you are rewriting history.

MR SPEAKER: Order, Mr Stanhope!

MR MOORE: No, I am not. Mr Stanhope, I heard you in silence. I ask you for the same respect. It is interesting that Mr Stanhope did this. Then he went through a series of things that we should provide more money for in this budget. It is always easy to say "more money"; more money for nurses, more money for unmet needs and disabilities, more dollars for indigenous health. More and more and more money.

Mr Speaker, I hope that we will be able to do that. I hope that we can have more money, but at the moment we have a budget that is finally getting to an appropriate and responsible way of doing it. We actually are spending the money that we earn. The legacy left to this government by Labor was to spend much more money than was earned. We finally got that under control, and now it is time to appropriately allocate and spend that money.

Mr Stanhope suggests first of all that we had the misallocation, if you like, of $62.9 million over four years. Mr Kaine mentioned that as well. The Assembly was not asked to give me what Mr Stanhope dubbed a slush fund. The funds were appropriated across three outputs, acute services, mental health services, and consumer and community priorities. They were allocated across there, and they were specifically allocated for growing needs in the community. Unlike some opposite and some who accuse politicians of taking a narrow and short-term view, we recognise that in a rapidly ageing community, in fact the most rapidly ageing community in Australia, there are going to be growing needs in our community. We are going to need to be able to do more operations. We know there is going to be a need for more money in renal. We know there is going to be a need for more money in a whole range of areas, and this money was specifically allocated for the growing needs of the community. Mr Speaker, that is how we allocated it.

When this issue was beaten up somewhat by Mr Stanhope, and I think also by Mr Kaine, I said that I would give you a closer indication of exactly how we would spend that money. That is a reasonable way to do it.

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