Page 1958 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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somebody from the Labor Party or elsewhere. It is everyone else’s fault; you are here only because of Jon Stanhope, and remember it every day. That is what we are told. I think they will find that it will be that same man who will be responsible for a number of them going out of this place in due course.
The Chief Minister likes to repeat the mantra of his former Treasurer, that extra money was spent on child protection and bushfire recovery. It is true that some funds were spent on those items. But a lot of funds were spent on other things, including a number of what I would call vanity items of personal interest to the Chief Minister. But whatever he has spent in those areas has been dwarfed by the massive blow-out in expenditure on the public service. As Mr Stefaniak stated earlier, of the $900 million windfall, $445 million has gone to Labor employing some 2,300 more public servants and paying them more. My advisers gave me these figures and I went through them several times because they are just so extraordinary. But there they are in the reports published by this administration. Half of the windfall gains and revenue that fell into the lap of the Stanhope government has, in fact, gone towards bloating the public service.
Have we seen improvements in services? Maybe we have a vastly improved city, a better-managed city. Is the healthcare better? Is it not the case that 4,500 people are on waiting lists for elective surgery? Are our children suddenly dramatically better educated? Is that what Mr Barr would have us believe? I do not think so. I have not looked at the latest figures, but this year I have taken representations from 600-odd people. People are not writing to me saying, “Things are going wonderfully well.” I hear from large numbers of people very dissatisfied about basic services in this city. Yet they have seen this massive increase in expenditure. When we see so much more outlay with no apparent improvement—indeed, we see a marked deterioration in the look of our city and the condition of our roads and other amenities—one has to ask about the efficiency with which these agencies are managed.
The budget acknowledges that some fundamental reforms are required to improve service delivery, reduce the cost of providing those services and reduce the drain on public finances. The budget does not directly use the words, but it strongly reinforces the need to accelerate economic growth in the territory through improved productivity. That is the test for the government’s management. I am sorry Ms Gallagher has bolted, but I know the former industrial relations minister. She does not believe in productivity. Mr Seselja and I had the pleasure of being educated on her views in estimates last year.
Mr Seselja: Didn’t they turn the lights off over Christmas?
MR MULCAHY: Yes. When I asked Ms Gallagher what the productivity savings were, she explained to us—in fairness, it may have been her official; she may have been just the presiding minister—that they save electricity by letting public servants take off from Christmas to New Year. This is the massive productivity gain this powerful negotiator got for the ACT taxpayer. I was talking to a media person a moment ago and I was asked to repeat that because that person was in a state of shock to hear that. That is the level of productivity negotiations.
I have no doubt that at the next EPA round the unions will say, “Now that you have ripped apart our super, we need to be compensated with higher wages.” If the negotiating skill of the territory in terms of wage matters is anything to go by, I think it will be the
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