Page 2825 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006

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government in five Assemblies time being required to find $300 million a year to feed our liability, a liability which each of us knows we do not have the capacity to meet. Yet no government since 1989 has been prepared to stand up and make this unpalatable decision and to announce it as fundamental to our future.

On that decision alone this is a good budget because a government found the courage to make such a hard and, at one level, distasteful decision and to carry through with it, because it is simply unsustainable and not doable. We could not have done it. The Treasurer of 2025 could not possibly have found that $300 million. There would be nowhere for it to come from. So this is a good budget. Through the debate today, the opposition has illustrated that it has no policies, that it has no vision, that it has no courage and that it has no strength. Through the debate, in relation to the announcements it makes about those policies that it would not support, it has potentially put back into the budget, I think, about $100 million.

Through all of the initiatives that it will not support, the ones that it will abandon, the ones that it would move from WPI back to CPI, the not accounting or the non-requirement for productivity savings in relation to wages, the non-closure of schools, the reintroduction of the tourism budget, the opposition to all the reforms in the Department of Territory and Municipal Services through the explicit decision not to support any of the initiatives in relation to territory and municipal services, the Liberal Party is today supporting another $100 million worth of promises. In relation to its attitude to rates, Mr Pratt specifically announced that rates would be cut under a Liberal government.

These are the announcements that will form part and parcel of the Liberal Party’s election campaign, those decisions which it will reverse, those rates that it will not accept, those schools which it will reopen. We ask: what are their policies? How are they going to pay for it? What other programs will they cut in order to meet this $100 million worth of promises that have been made over the course of the last two days?

Proposed expenditure agreed to.

Proposed expenditure—Part 1.24—Treasurer’s Advance, $26,900,000—agreed to.

Proposed expenditure—total appropriations, $1,840,542,000 (net cost of outputs), $486,600,000 (capital injection) and $377,408,000 (payments on behalf of the Territory), totalling $2,731,450,000.

Question put:

That the proposed expenditure be agreed to.

The Assembly voted—

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