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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 8 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 2354 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Outpatient services in our public hospitals increase, with an apparently massive increase in additional funding. They increase by a grand one extra outpatient per day! That is one person, not 1 per cent. Not one per 100,000 or anything-one extra person every day goes through the ACT's public hospitals.

The question has to be asked: what exactly does the ACT taxpayer get for that extra money? What do we get? Mr Deputy Speaker, you would think that Labor would show a bit of concern for its claimed political heartland, but housing rents have gone up by $6.2 million, while actual government funding for ACT Housing has gone down $3.1 million from last year.

This year there was the paltry amount of only $125,000 allocated to assist people with short-term emergency accommodation needs. This will do very little to address the chronic problem of homelessness in our community, especially in the area of emergency accommodation. Last year's housing budget contained $240,000 for short-term crisis accommodation-overnight accommodation-plus $1.5 million allocated for crisis accommodation and management.

You may be able to talk about areas of emergency need that you are meeting, but there are also areas of existing need which you are not meeting anything like as well as was the case in the past.

Labor's only solution is a $3 million slush fund-there is that word again-allocated to the affordable housing task force. This is not good enough. The affected people need real solutions now, not six or 12 months down the track.

The remand centre decision does nothing to address the longer-term problems identified in the Rengain report into ACT correctional needs. Rengain recommended against building a new remand centre separate from a prison. Labor is just deferring the hard decisions on the location. Perhaps Labor would be more comfortable with another review.

Mr Deputy Speaker, this budget marks the end of Labor's honeymoon. The florid language is giving way to tawdry reality. Earlier, I likened the Chief Minister to the Emperor Nero. The writer, Teutonius, gives an account of the Emperor Nero's reign in which he recalls that, during a crisis facing the empire, Nero suddenly took himself off for a visit to Greece. I note that our Chief Minister proposes to do precisely the same thing in the days after this budget is brought down.

One might think that the Chief Minister's job is here, defending and selling this budget. A month in Greece must seem very much more inviting than staying back to explain to a bewildered public why so many of Labor's promises from the last election have had to go off to the landfill.

This budget, as I have said, is unimaginative and lazy-it is a failed budget. It is more than most observers would expect, after seven long years in the wilderness, when Labor had the chance to reconstruct a vision for the ACT. The budget does not disclose a vision for the ACT. There is nothing of that in this document. It is a document which breaks promises and shows no vision for the future.

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