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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Friday, 14 May 2004) . . Page.. 1970 ..

Cities have one crucial resource—their people. Human cleverness, desires, motivations, imagination and creativity are replacing location, natural resources and market access as urban resources.

We will demonstrate how a Smyth Liberal government will develop, fund and implement positive policies to build a creative city. We will work with the people of Canberra to build Canberra, the creative city—a city, a territory, with an exciting future.

MS DUNDAS (3.43): It is with great pleasure that, on behalf of the Democrats, I rise to talk on the budget for the ACT. This budget does not provide a lot for people who currently have the least opportunity to succeed. While the budget is for business and there is a bit in there for students, it does not really look out for those who are the worst off in our community.

This is a budget built on broken promises. The Stanhope government has a practice of announcing initiatives, earmarking money in the budget, and then failing to actually spend that money. They have done this for the last two years with stamp duty concession funding and with crime prevention funds. They massively underspent on new adaptable housing for people with disabilities and on the digital divide program that is meant to give IT skills to people left behind by the IT revolution. Also, $45 million was rolled over through the capital works budget.

These are just a few of the examples where this government has made a promise and then not followed through. It is not good enough to make an announcement, put a promise out there, bask in the praise of everybody saying, “That’s a really good idea, we want to see that happen” and then fail to deliver.

The government required departments to make $10 million in savings in the 2003-04 financial year, which impacted on promises made in previous budgets. They are expecting departments to make similar savings into the coming years. So the promised budget allocations for initiatives may not be as generous as they first appear as departments try to meet the requirements that the expenditure review committee is putting on them. The Democrats believe that the government needs to work on how it implements the promises it makes and how it follows through on the initiatives announced in the budget papers.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I would like to talk about some of the issues that the budget papers address. I think we can be proud that the average student in ACT schools is doing better than students in other states and territories. But I think this is in some way a result of the fact that ACT parents are more likely to be tertiary educated. As we know, having tertiary educated parents is correlated with above average literacy and numeracy skills.

But what we should not be so proud of is having such a large gap in educational outcomes between our top and our bottom students. The government was urged to commit extra funding to learning assistance and reading recovery teachers, to commit funds to extra welfare support staff and parent involvement programs to help close the gap between outstanding and struggling students.

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