Page 1901 - Week 06 - Thursday, 5 May 2005
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Mr Mulcahy: They’re not putting Stanhope out to pasture, are they?
MRS DUNNE: That is a good idea. Where is the financial commitment to real conservation measures? For a start, Environment ACT faces a 6.6 per cent cut in overall funding, and this is presumably part of what the Chief Minister calls the year of consolidation that he says his agencies should undertake. There is also a cut of eight staff along the way.
As Dr Foskey has noted, this government has no serious commitment to large-scale ecological and rehabilitation or species conservation. There is certainly no serious policy in regard to water. It refuses to even countenance any venture to significantly increase supply. Instead it proposes bandaid measures that it hopes will get it through to the next election. In addition, the government is increasing the water extraction charge by 25 per cent.
The budget papers say that substantial government resources continue to be directed towards repair and reconstruction of assets damaged by the January 2003 bushfires. But where are those substantial resources? Let us contrast. There is $70,000 for bushfire-related compliance reviews as against—and this is my favourite blowout in the budget—$220,000 in addition to the $185,000 previously allocated for the bushfire memorial. That is a 112 per cent budget blowout. There is $75,000 for a greenhouse gas abatement scheme as against $2 million for strategic program implementations, primarily feasibility and planning studies for Shaping our territory projects, such as the establishment of the overbloated international arboretum.
The Stanhope government appeals to environmentalist sentiment, especially in an election year, but does not really care about environmentalist practice, especially when any green initiative would take money away from what might be given to camp followers and pet projects. The Stanhope government’s green credentials in several major respects mirror its pledge on education and training. It uses the appropriate rhetoric, it commissions the appropriate packaging, but it only delivers in policy and budget increments what is convenient to it and what does not interfere with its primary concern, which is bread and circuses.
As the Chief Minister himself said during the election campaign in October, “Labor promised to abandon the ‘can do’ culture.” Judging from this year’s budget, Labor is well on the way to keeping at least that promise with a vengeance. I suspect it does not really want a “can do” culture. I suspect it wants a “let’s pretend” culture. Indeed, the government is well on the way to turning Canberra into a new kind of Potemkin village—a Stanhope village in which personal and business initiative are stifled and mediocrity is paid to thrive.
In conclusion, and to be fair to him, the shock of finding himself a bit short of other people’s money has had a sobering effect on Mr Quinlan. He has been not quite as arrogant this year as previously, though it does take some gall or perhaps just delusion to claim that there is no problem with a $91.5 million deficit because, in the best of all possible worlds, things might look up again some time in the future. Mr Quinlan, of course, does not have to worry too much about this because doubtless, come the next election, he will be tending his own garden. It is just a pity, given the government’s
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