Page 1974 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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schools. This budget delivers the school closures that the Labor Party promised would not happen at the last election.
We had an interesting debate yesterday. We had the former education minister say, in relation to consultation on school closures, “Mrs Dunne wants to slow the process down; Mrs Dunne does not want to get on with the job.” The question is: What does this government want to do? This government wants to slash and burn. It does not want to have to consult. It has announced its 39 school closures in this budget and we are going to see those 39 schools closed. We will see token consultation but, in the end, we will see that the Labor Party will confirm that what they took to the people at the last election was a lie. In relation to education, it was simply not true. They deceived the people of Canberra in a massive way. That is why there will be a massive backlash, especially in relation to school closures—because the people have been deceived.
We have also heard the new minister talk about, in relation to school closures, what will be done with the proceeds if they then go and sell some of the land. When he was asked, “Minister, will you comply with the provision of the Labor platform which says that proceeds from school assets sold should be retained by the education system?” the minister responded, “I believe that to be a very sound principle. Yes, we would comply with that.”
We have it on the record that, in the midst of all these closures, we are not going to see any savings in the education budget. They are going to put the people of Canberra through the angst of closing 40 schools, but they are not going to save any money. That is one of the biggest failures of this budget and of this government.
I turn now to the public service. From 2001 to 2005 we have seen an increase of around 16 per cent in the number of employees in the public service, with an extra 2,346 employees joining the service. What was the reaction of the Chief Minister upon learning of the increases? He was surprised. He was shocked. He had no idea things were so far out of control. The total lack of understanding and ignorance of the condition of the single biggest cost of the entire government, its wages, by the Chief Minister is nothing short of disgraceful. And now we are going to see another 500 public servants cut.
The question is, why did we allow it to blow out in the first place. We had to go through the wasting of public money. We had $445 million of the $900 million windfall spent on public service wages. Now we are going to rein it in and sack lots of people. Lots of public servants will be sacked. Of course there are all the costs associated with hiring them, and then big redundancies. This is an inept way of managing the public sector. Once again, it is the people of Canberra who are going to pay, and it is individual public servants who are going to pay for the loss of their jobs and their livelihoods.
I turn now to planning. I want to comment on the state of the planning system in the ACT and how this budget is not going to help it but is going to make it worse. Minister Corbell should be concerned. We have seen the debacle of his plan for the busway, and we had to have some comment.
Apart from a little bit of a carryover to spend more money on planning for a busway that is not going to happen, in this budget there is no money for the building of a busway, and we know it is not going to happen. Mr Hargreaves has told us it is not going to happen.
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