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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 4 Hansard (29 March) . . Page.. 1195 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

We note that the government has advised that there will be funding for public service reform. The committee recognises that it is a healthy process for all organisations to take a good look at themselves from time to time, to review what they are doing, kick the sand box over, put it back together and be reprioritised or reoriented. However, the committee is aware that this happened to coincide with a very public, recent negative experience of the government, namely, Bruce Stadium and seems also to be a part of redirecting the limelight for what happened at Bruce Stadium onto the public service as opposed to where it should lie, that is, with the executive. We do not think that it is productive to hold a review under those circumstances and expect to get a positive result.

I turn to the funds provided for assessing unmet need and responding to the report on poverty. We think that this is a positive thing and have said so. However, we would warn the government not to lose sight of the broader community needs in any review like that. There are other areas, such as mental health, personal isolation and domestic violence, that are not necessarily directly associated with poverty, but they are areas of community need that ought also to be taken into account in that review.

We were so bold as to recommend that the government revisit the committee's report on service purchasing arrangements, the purchaser/provider report, to pick up our recommendation on the mapping exercise of services that the government receives and needs. Given that they want, on one hand, to assess unmet need, we cannot reconcile that with their refusal to accept our recommendation to run that mapping exercise, even though that mapping exercise was part of the strategy that they adopted for the introduction of the purchaser/provider concept in the first place. There is a lot of contradiction in what the government does in this area.

Referring to the ACTCOSS submission for a moment, it is a coincidence that the money that the government has put aside as an initiative is precisely the same money frame as was recommended by ACTCOSS, so we presume that there has been consultation. We think that that is a good thing, although ACTCOSS might have recognised it when they came to talk to us.

I refer now to the GMC 400 car race. The item of funding for this race cannot in any way be called a budget initiative. The $1.5 million provided is in addition to the originally budgeted $2.5 million, bringing the expenditure to $4 million a year. That is just to run the same thing; it is not to make it any bigger or different. I can recall, as shadow minister for sport, that in the early days that the GMC was mooted there were ironclad guarantees that it would not cost one cent more than the government's original budget, and those ironclad guarantees were mentioned on a number of occasions in this place. I have to make the comment that virtually everything that this government touches in relation to business or entrepreneurship just turns to lead.

Turning to the Rally of Canberra, again, not enough information has been provided either in the initiative or in forward estimates of previous years for us to know what the additional support is in terms of relativity in relation to the original money, so it was very difficult for the committee to make any real comment on that as an initiative.

There is an initiative involving the expenditure of $300,000 in each of two years described as "financial assistance for the creation of a national photonics training institute in the ACT, the only one of its kind in Australia". It transpires that this claim is

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