Page 3885 - Week 12 - Thursday, 23 November 2006
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bureaucracy and the tail end and less cutting of the front line. The decision to close Griffith library really smacks of that. The priorities are going to cutting front-line services, not to cutting bureaucratic waste. So the minister is quite wrong when he says that he is taking gigantic steps to cut bureaucratic waste. He is not doing that. We are seeing front-line services cut instead.
The community’s anger about this matter has been clearly demonstrated by the 3,500 signatories distributed in this place through three petitions. The government is going to have to wear a particularly heavy load in terms of community concern about this, and this may blow back into this government’s face. The minister accuses us of grandstanding. We are not doing that. We are defending the community’s right to have a library and we are defending a community that has been trodden upon. That is why we have decided here today that this minister deserves censure. (Time expired.)
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Indigenous Affairs and Minister for the Arts) (4.19): The government does not support this motion. In government from time to time the most unpalatable and difficult decisions must be made. This is a decision that I am sure the minister and every member of the government would wish had not been made, would wish was not necessary, and would wish that they did not need to be associated with. It is a difficult, unpalatable decision, but in the view of the government it is a necessary and right decision.
I think every member of this place and every member of the Canberra community is aware of a range of very difficult decisions that the government has made in the context of the most recent budget—a range of difficult decisions that are a reflection of the infrastructure and the structures which we, as a government and as a community, inherited from the commonwealth when we achieved self-government in 1989. Over that period since 1989 we have sought to maintain an infrastructure that was provided by the commonwealth at a time when it had no mind to the implications in terms of maintenance and the cost of maintaining that infrastructure and the range of services of a self-governing territory.
The decisions that were made, the structures that were put in place and the infrastructure and its design which we inherited on self-government were not designed or constructed by a commonwealth government with a view to potential future self-government and the implications on a future self-governing territory of those structures and of that infrastructure. That has led successive governments over that period to seek with the best will in the world to maintain a range and level of government services or community services. With our narrow revenue base and our other priorities we have each, as governments, struggled to maintain those services—to the point where, as of June this year, the ACT government, in delivering services to the people of Canberra, was delivering those services at a cost of the order across the board of 20 per cent above the national average.
That was in the context of a government which, in its revenue raising, was charging at a level on average with Australian levels of taxation charging. The situation which persists is that our taxation effort is of the order of the national average but our expenditure on the delivery of government services persists and continues to be significantly above national benchmarking and national averages. Of course, the
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