Page 1979 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Mrs Dunne: You could have paid for it out of the GST windfalls—$900 million, $1.2 billion.
MR STANHOPE: Mrs Dunne says we could have paid for it out of the GST. The Liberal Party believe that in relation to the $900 million GST so-called windfall because the Liberal Party would not have funded any additional childcare workers. It is only this government that in successive years has had the will, the compassion and the determination to deal with issues of child abuse, to the extent that we have funded child protection services to the tune of a 90 per cent increase a year.
The Liberal Party would have used that money, which they claim we wasted, by not expending the 16 per cent a year on disability services that we have spent every year since coming to government as a result of the royal commission headed by Justice Gallop. It was the result of the lack of service delivery by the Liberal Party in relation to disability services.
That is 16 per cent a year on disability services, implementing the recommendations of Justice Gallop’s royal commission into the failings of the Liberal Party; 16 per cent a year on disability services, a result of a lack of action and care by the Liberal Party; 90 per cent a year in relation to child protection, as a result of an absolute lack of concern for child abuse by the Liberal Party; a 46 per cent increase in emergency services, which says a lot about the Liberal Party; an increase in health expenditure—and I laid down this challenge before the Leader of the Opposition’s reply today—from the $415 million in the Liberal Party’s last budget five years ago, to $750 million.
I asked the Leader of the Opposition to indicate which parts of that additional $300 million annual recurrent expenditure in health the Liberal Party would not have spent. Of six in a row, not a single one of you responded to that challenge. Not one of you said what you would not have done. Here we have Mrs Dunne railing about our expenditure and crying crocodile tears, as she does about things like child abuse, not acknowledging once that the increase in child protection workers from 40 to 120 was a reasonable thing for this government to do.
Do you include the additional 80 child protection workers in your description of a fat, bloated, overpaid public service? Are these the public servants that you would not have employed? Are these the overpaid, unrequired, unnecessary public servants? Are the dozens of additional firefighters that we have employed overpaid and unnecessary? Do you include the additional 120 police—
Mr Pratt: We told you that the police—
MR STANHOPE: we have employed in your list of overpaid, unnecessary public servants?
Mr Pratt: Oh, really!
MR SPEAKER: I warn you, Mr Pratt!
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .