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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 3 Hansard (8 March) . . Page.. 864 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

I have never said that there was only one solution to this problem. There are a range of solutions to it. But restraint in job growth and reducing the job numbers in many sectors has contributed to that very significantly.

MR QUINLAN: Mr Speaker, I ask a supplementary question. Chief Minister, how do you reconcile operating deficits? In the $344 million backcast year there is an operating deficit of $250 million before abnormal items-and do not let that get in the way of your misinformation. The following year there was an operating deficit of $100 million. The year after that it was $148 million; the year after that, $131 million. Only after there was a quantum leap in Commonwealth funding did we go into surplus. How do you reconcile that?

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, first of all, I am not going to accept any figures that Mr Quinlan quotes at me today. I want to see for myself what those figures are before I assume that what he says is the case.

Mr Quinlan refers to misinformation from the government. I have to remind him yet again that this misinformation is obviously such cleaver misinformation that it has actually been able to fool the ACT Auditor-General, who endorsed that figure in his report a few years ago.

It is also no coincidence that today Mr Quinlan desperately wants to rake back over figures that are several years old. He is trying to reconstruct the shattered shell of Labor's legacy to the ACT-to somehow build back a shiny cathedral when in fact it was only a smoking ruin for this government to have to deal with. It is not surprising that he should try to do this, given the figures that I was quoting earlier today in my answer to the question from Mr Hird, which demonstrate that at the moment the ACT is enjoying a very good economic performance.

Is it a coincidence, I wonder, that the opposition is doing everything it can not to talk about those figures-not to talk about the good news for the ACT, the good news for people employed, the good news for people in retail, the good news for women? They prefer not to talk about any of those things but instead try to backcast and reconstruct the situation from the period when Labor was in office.

Let me give some advice, Mr Quinlan. I would leave the former government's-

Mr Quinlan: I don't want it, thanks. If it is anything to do with finance, I don't want your advice. Spare me.

MR HUMPHRIES: If I were you, Mr Quinlan, I would stop trying to defend the former Labor government, as this offers a new broom, a new agenda. You should not try to pretend that what the former government did was particularly good when it comes to economic performance.

Mr Quinlan's theory of economic management is that it does not matter a fig what you do in the ACT-it does not matter if you reduce jobs, if you reduce the size of your workforce or if you invest in jobs growth; it does not matter if you do all these things-because you are just a little cork bobbing up and down in the ocean and other forces wash over you and you have no control. I do not buy that line. I think the ACT is able to

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