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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 1 Hansard (12 December) . . Page.. 167 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

To the credit of its officers, we have seen considerable achievements from the Australian Federal Police, such as Operation Anchorage, which constituted the most sustained attack on crime in the history of the ACT.

If my memory serves me correctly, the minister said at the time that it was a statistical inevitability that those numbers would come down and was almost disparaging of the efforts of those officers. Another member of the then Labor opposition, Mr Hargreaves, said words to the effect "only if the figures can be believed". Clearly, now that they are in government, they are going to take some of the shine, the reflected glory, from those figures.

Mr Humphries: Apparently, they can be believed now.

MR SMYTH: As Mr Humphries says, apparently the figures can be believed now; they are not statistical inevitabilities. Some of the shine which now reflects on the current government was certainly achieved by the hard work of the AFP. I am grateful for that and it is appropriate to recognised it.

Mr Humphries has already addressed the points made about financial management and the state of the budget, but it strikes me from what we have heard in the days since the Labor Party came to office that the Labor government is a government that is looking for a deficit, is almost wishing that we will have a deficit, so that it can get out of the promises which it knows that it cannot keep. We saw that today with the Chief Minister and Minister for Health. I think he has now spent the $6 million that was promised three times. It is now going to help cover cancer equipment and Comcare premiums, which is interesting. I guess that this is where we will get back to the $344 million operating loss that was left to the previous government.

The issues already covered by Mr Humphries are important and I sound a warning to the Canberra community that this government is a government looking for a deficit to weasel out of its promises, because it realises now that some of the costings done in the Gerritsen report were inaccurate, as we pointed out. Mrs Dunne pointed yesterday to the $75 million a year missing for land management. We now know that the Chief Minister is going to be the first health minister in the history of the ACT since self-government to fund the hospital less in a given year. I think we will see more of that rather than less. We will see more of it rather than less because Labor disregarded the advice of Mr Humphries as Treasurer that a buffer must be left and decided that they could spend the money. Mr Quinlan was quite confident then that there would be enough money to cover his promises, but he is now looking for excuses.

The speech moves on to regulatory reform and talks about the red tape task force, a task force set up by the Liberal government to free business from the burden of bowing to the government and allow business to get on with its activities. It is pleasing that the red tape task force will continue to do the work that we set it up to do.

Turning to the next paragraph, I have some regret about the establishment of Business Canberra. It is pleasing that there will be a business body that will advise the government on how business feels. The great shame is that we have never heard why CanTrade must go. I think we all know in our hearts why it must go. CanTrade has had a huge amount of success in the six years that it has been in operation. It has been innovative on things

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