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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 10 Hansard (29 August) . . Page.. 3007 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

to tell us how. It sounds all too familiar from this government. It is just making the story up as it goes.

In fact, according to Mr Wood, we could even end up with the bizarre situation that the department of education would be required to pay the Department of Urban Services for parking spaces. What can I say? Would that be an example of our education dollars at work, Mr Speaker? Should this ridiculous situation occur, the government would be guilty of canning free school buses to pay for parking spaces instead.

Mr Speaker, as well as secret tax increases, the budget contains cuts in expenditure. The worst examples of that are the cuts to road maintenance. The same pattern was followed by the last Labor government under Rosemary Follett. The road network was poorly maintained over a number of years, so much so that regular cash injections were required during the Carnell-Humphries era to bring the territory's roads back up to scratch. It would be a tragedy if the whole process were to happen again.

The budget shows that suburban road maintenance has been cut by over three-quarters just for this year and that street sign replacement and road marking have also been cut to ribbons-not a good start for the new minister, I would have thought. I was also amused by the minister's efforts to explain away these cuts during estimates. Mr Wood tried to explain them away by saying that most of the funding for municipal road maintenance is to be diverted to upgrading bridges with a claim that bridges are a part of roads, too, and this approach was not really a reduction.

Unfortunately, all of the examples that the minister used to support his argument were about upgrading the bridges on territory roads, not municipal roads. Given that fact, it would be clear to anyone without ALP-coloured glasses that, to its great discredit, municipal road maintenance has been renamed by this government. The minister was quick to point out during estimates that this cut to roads funding would be only for one year. I trust that will turn out to be the case.

Mr Speaker, the government is fortunate to have inherited from the Liberals an infrastructure of such high quality when it took office. It would be a tragedy if the high standard of roads, ovals, public transport, bike paths, urban parks and the like were to fritter away through false economy.

I delivered that speech on behalf of Mrs Cross. Again, I apologise for her absence, but she is seriously ill and will not be able to be here today. I will conclude by making a few points on items that I had in mind and did not bring up in my first 10 minutes.

I note that $100,000 has been set aside for a further study in relation to the Kippax library. I think that it is of crucial importance that the future of that library be guaranteed. Certainly, the previous government accepted that there is a need for a permanent library, and a larger library at that. Indeed, there was provision for that in two plans that were before the Assembly. In fact, one must ask about what is actually happening in terms of the centre as a whole. I certainly hope that work on that will progress because it is very important for the region. The sport and fitness centre there is idle. There is a lot of potential in Kippax that is simply not being realised and action needs to be taken quickly there.

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