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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 10 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 2811 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

documentation was opaque and partly because the processes did not appear to be fully thought out or articulated from the government's point of view.

Although the members of this place would take a different view in principle about whether socialisation of land development is a good thing, there is absolutely no question about the fact that there needs to be extreme transparency about this process in order that the proper safeguards and the proper testing of propositions can be conducted by this Assembly. I do not believe-and I think it is fair to say that the Estimates Committee did not believe-that there was as much information on the table about this process as there ought to be at this stage.

There are other areas of the budget which we believe need further elucidation, but in part that is a product of the fact that the government is conducting a large number of reviews and answers apparently are not available at this stage. I think this is particularly so in the case of education and the expenditure of additional money there. I will come back to further comments later in the debate, but those are my general comments about those three matters before the house at the moment.

MR PRATT (11.54): Mr Speaker, I rise to echo the concerns expressed by my colleagues. Yes, this may be an adequate budget and therefore one that we have a duty to support. However, I have a number of concerns, because it is a budget which is lazy and visionless. I now wish to give an overview regarding my concerns. I will list those concerns, starting with the premature dropping of the V8 race.

There are, and there would have been, sufficient funds to allow this rather new concept of an event to continue. It has not been allowed the time necessary to prove itself. I believe the government has taken the lazy and easy way out by dropping it like a hot potato. I also observe the broken promises made by the government on the dragway.

Mr Quinlan: Articulate that promise, Mr Pratt!

MR PRATT: I will in good time, Mr Quinlan. I will show you how it can be done.

Mr Speaker, There was the dropping of the dragway, which left the motor sport community in uproar. I also point to the casual waving-away of the unimportant 2,000 car parking spaces at Canberra Stadium as part of the GDE plan.

Within the subject area of workplace relations, I point to the move to reduce the number of EBAs introduced as part of the previous government's initiatives, in the so-called name of efficiency. This lazily degrades fairness and will be a detriment to productivity. This is only because it is easier to succumb to union pressure rather than seek to build on initiatives taken by the previous government to improve the territory's productivity and perhaps broaden fairness in the way the government treats its employees.

I point to the terrible inequity we have seen in the new $20 million funding allocation to schools, with only 5 per cent of that going to non-government schools. I will speak about that in more detail later. I refer to the expenditure of funds on laptop computers. This is an initiative on which I congratulate the government. However, it is an initiative which is unsupportable.

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