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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 6 Hansard (17 June) . . Page.. 1893 ..

Mrs Dunne

: Hey, it's estimates.

MS MacDONALD

: It is estimates, but there should not always be posturing for the sake of posturing just because you are in opposition and we are in government, although, obviously, this is politics.

Mr Smyth

: You weren't here for the last seven years.

MS MacDONALD

: That is true, but I have no comment to make on the events of the last seven years.

MR SPEAKER

: Order! Direct comments through the chair.

MS MacDONALD

: I apologise, Mr Speaker. One of the areas that I wanted to concentrate on was education. In my opinion, Mr Speaker, there was a dearth of inquiry into this area. I think that that is a terrible thing because education, as we all know, is an important area. In fact, members will see when they finally get their copies of the report that there are just on two pages on that in the report. There would have been just over two pages. However, I was able to remove some things. We did not look into any policy areas or anything to do with the budget itself. Instead, the opposition chose to engage in an ideological debate about public versus private funding.

Mrs Dunne

: You could have made a contribution.

MS MacDONALD

: I did make a contribution, Mrs Dunne. I asked several questions, but the opposition chose instead to focus on public versus private funding and the abolition of the intra-school subsidy scheme. Mr Speaker, I do not think you will be surprised, but, of course, the ALP does have a difference of opinion about the allocation of funds for public versus private schools. We do have a difference of opinion. As I said last night, the fact is that a clause making the point that something is wrong because we do not agree with it is not a good one to put in. Mr Speaker, I am happy to say that, fortunately, Mrs Cross agreed with me on those areas and the clauses about public versus private funding, the ideological thing, were withdrawn, as were the misrepresentations in claims that there had not been any evidence provided for why the government was spending the education dollars in the way that they were.

Mr Speaker, that leads me to the area of health. The report makes the comment that health was the primary area that we focused on because we only had time to focus on one department in detail. I point out, Mr Speaker, that one-third of the report deals with the area of health. I think that it is unfortunate that it failed to focus on many other important areas. I have to say, however, that I was hardly surprised, because Mr Smyth does have a former health minister of a political transient nature working in consultancy for him and giving him advice on the area of health, so it was hardly surprising that he had that report focused on health, to the exclusion of other areas.

Finally, I want to talk about another area of great concern to me. Mr Hargreaves has touched on the matter and you will be deliberating on it. I refer to leaks to the media. I did mean to mention this issue when I spoke about the Public Accounts Committee's inquiry into the Rates and Land Tax Amendment Bill 2003. However, I got caught up in

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