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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2350 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

budget." If you are concerned about car theft and house burglary in Canberra, is it not logical to vote for a budget which includes a further $10 million in resourcing of the community's effort to fight crime? That seems logical to me, but obviously I have a different form of logic to that of others in the debate.

I think this is a good budget in respect of justice and community safety. It resources the things that matter in respect of community safety in particular. It provides resourcing of an important part of the community's armoury-that is, the Federal Police-which in some years in the past has been neglected. I think the Assembly owes it to this community to support a budget which sees those extra dollars put into the area where need is greatest.

Proposed expenditure agreed to.

Proposed expenditure-Part 15-Department of Education and Community Services, $404,747,000 (net cost of outputs), $28,949,000 (capital injection) and $108,329,000 (payments on behalf of the territory), totalling $542,025,000.

MR BERRY (11.15): How could you support this line in the budget with this minister in charge? If there were ever a bunch of reasons to oppose this line in the budget, they have been created in part by this minister, and certainly I will refer to a few of them. Just to set the pattern, I will hark back to a few things. I will not go any further back than the Spence campus at Mount Rogers.

Mr Stefaniak: They all voted for that one. The community wanted that.

MR BERRY: I am glad that the minister interjected that they all voted that way. Well, they did not all vote that way. In fact, many of them were not consulted and that was the difficulty. If it had been better handled you might have come up with a better result. The fact of the matter is that the board voted that way and the minister enthusiastically approved of the closure of one of the campuses without the approval of the community.

Unhappily, a lot of people were upset by that proposal. That is the sort of pattern which has spread into the minister's handling of his portfolio. There has been a certain amount of arrogance. We all remember the efforts of this Assembly in preventing this minister from closing down a pre-school and how the community rose up against that and, happily, stopped it. I know that was a while back, but it is all part of a pattern.

I should also talk about industrial relations in the education system. I want to go back to the belting that the bursars got from this minister. The minister said, "Well, why don't you compare it with New South Wales?" I did not hear of any bursars or teachers being stood down in New South Wales, so that is a bad comparison.

When you look at what happened to the bursars and other people throughout the ACT public service-the inequities in the outcomes for individuals throughout the public service-you see a reflection of the industrial relations ideology of the conservatives opposite, particularly in respect of wages and salary outcomes. It is a case of the strongest do best and the weakest do worst. This is reflected, too, in the Chief Minister's portfolio where I understand a wage increase for officers was fully supplemented.

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