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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 3 Hansard (6 March) . . Page.. 584 ..
MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):
"There is not enough time to consider this properly. We do not have the mechanisms to be able to ask the questions of the community."
Mr Hargreaves: We don't have a draft budget.
MR HUMPHRIES: You do know what we are proposing to do with additional spending for this year.
Mr Hargreaves: You haven't given us a draft budget.
MR HUMPHRIES: You have got the draft budget, Mr Hargreaves. If you have been too lazy to pick up your papers and read them carefully, I suggest that you get some of your staff to do that for you.
Mr Hargreaves: You haven't got a draft budget.
MR HUMPHRIES: You have seen the initiatives that we are proposing for the coming year.
MR SPEAKER: Mr Hargreaves, you are going to be very shortly the first one to get warned.
MR HUMPHRIES: We are adding $4.6 million to them; the $4.6 million in additional spending which has come through from the Grants Commission-provisionally, I should point out.
Mr Speaker, after the criticism of last year, you would think that those opposite would be happy with that. We are giving them the chance to shape the budget with no strings attached. This $4.6 million has not been allocated in any way by the government. It could be spent on new initiatives, it could be spent on increasing existing initiatives, it could be spent on reducing revenue, it could be spent on retiring debt and it could be spent on increasing our superannuation kitty; anything at all or any combination of those things is available. You wanted more latitude in the fiscal position and you have got it.
What have we got, Mr Speaker? We have complaints: "We have not got the time to consider this properly. We have not got the means to go back and ask the community." I cannot understand how it is that people who have been in politics for years and years do not have some idea already of how the expenditure of $4.6 million might improve the social position of this territory. Surely they have got some inkling, some glimmer of a thought about how they might spend that $4.6 million to improve the lot of the people who live in this territory.
Mr Kaine: Spend the lot on reducing poverty, Chief Minister; that is a good start.
MR HUMPHRIES
: Thank you. Mr Kaine, decisive as ever, has put a suggestion on the table. Indeed, Mr Speaker, there are lots of things that we could do to pick up further the agenda which has been placed on the table by the ACT Council of Social Service to address poverty. That is actually a good suggestion. If the committees recommend that, I would be very willing to consider it very seriously indeed,
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