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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (20 June) . . Page.. 2150 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

The brains trust, Smyth, Humphries, Stefaniak and Michael Moore, were sitting around the table. One of the four said, "What about this free bus idea that we promised six years ago and dropped? It was good for that election. We got up in that election. We promised 1,000 public hospital beds. We promised free school buses. We promised to reduce the waiting list by 20 per cent. We promised the Belconnen pool. We didn't keep any of the promises, but we were elected in that election. Why don't we try them all again? Which one of them will we pick this time? Can we go for the 1,000 public hospital beds again? We are still toying with the Belconnen pool. We have never built it. Mr Stefaniak has turned the sod three times now, but we still don't have it. What about the free school buses? That was a good one last time."

So, bingo, free school buses appeared in the budget. That is how it was done. That was the basis for the decision. That was the intellectual rigour that was applied.

Then they said, "We had better get this into place before the election," and that is what this bill of Mr Berry's is all about. They said, "We had better get this into place before the election." Don't worry about how many people miss out; don't worry about the educational opportunities to be denied to the vast majority of Canberra kids; just get it into place. And don't worry about the extra cost.

At the estimates we asked, "Well, how are you going to do it? Do you have enough buses?" What was the reply? "No, we will hire them." So we are going to spend $1.4 million between now and the election on hiring buses just to get this into place before the election so that the first round of free tickets can go out. The government thinks, "Nobody can interfere with it then. Nobody will dare to argue against the free bus scheme if we have hired $1.4 million worth of free buses and got it into place before the election, just to frighten the horses and to try to intimidate anybody else out of arguing against this scheme."

That is how shallow this notion is, and so obviously and patently a vote buying exercise it is. The government is hiring buses, $1.4 million worth of them, so that it can get this into place a month before the election and so that people, overcome by the government's largesse, will rush to the ballot boxes and vote for them.

The people of Canberra are smarter than that, of course. They are smarter than that in a number of ways. They know it was this government that imposed a zonal system that doubled school fares only two years ago. That is the great irony of this. It was this government that only two years ago instituted the current zonal system that doubled school bus fares for the people of Canberra. You did it only two years ago. Now you are lauding the fact that you are providing free buses after imposing two years of pain on all those families that have battled to meet the double bus fare scheme which you introduced. It is your scheme that you are now railing against. You did it.

There is another great issue in relation to this. Let's not get caught up about the damage that we are doing to the Westminster system, or the damage we are doing to a government's capacity to be master of its budget, and everything that Mr Moore said. This is another extreme irony in the face of the prince of politics' firm support for minority government. This really is an argument about minority government.

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