Page 1927 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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housing and a range of other government services will be delivered in the territory well into the future.
A vision has been presented by the minister for education, by way of example. Towards 2020: reviewing our schools is a vision for education in the territory. It affects, as the minister has been saying, those children that attend, for the first time, preschool next year. They will finish school in the year 2020. This budget deals with the development, the articulation and the implementation of a new vision designed to revitalise the delivery of education in a sustainable way in this territory until at least 2020.
The way we operate in education and across the board on government services cannot be sustained; we cannot tread water; we cannot expect to be able to deliver the range of services at the quality and the level we currently do into the future if we do not take corrective action, which is at the heart of the budget which I delivered this week—a tough, hard budget taken by a tough, committed government, with courage and preparedness to face the people of Canberra on the decisions it has taken. They are decisions that you wimped in government—decisions that are all the harder now as a result of a lack of decision by you.
MR SPEAKER: The minister’s time has expired.
MR STEFANIAK: Why are you wasting so much ratepayers’ money on propaganda such as your full-page ad yesterday in the paper when you are raising taxes and charges and reducing services?
MR SPEAKER: Do you see what I mean, Mr Smyth?
MR STANHOPE: How perceptive of you, Mr Speaker, to know precisely that the question would lead to the suggestion that any expenditure on the provision of information to the people of Canberra is a waste of money. There it was, out of the mouths of babes. The whole point of the question was to suggest that the provision of any information to the people of Canberra is a waste of money. There is the question: how do you justify this waste of money?
What is the waste of money? The waste of money is letting the people of Canberra know what the decisions the government has announced on education mean; what they mean for the people; what they mean for their children; and what they mean for the future of the territory. It is a waste of money so far as the Liberal Party is concerned to let the people of Canberra know the decisions we have taken on health and to let them understand the decisions that have been made, the commitment we have made, to the services that will be available.
Mr Smyth: Most of them have been reading the Daily Telegraph this morning. They know exactly what it is, Jon.
MR SPEAKER: Put it down, Mr Smyth.
Mr Smyth: Mr Speaker, you used to do this.
MR SPEAKER: Put it down.
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