Page 2910 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
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MR BARR: Mrs Dunne has said time after time that we are throwing good money after bad; that with all of the upgrades, the 223 upgrade projects that occurred in the 2006-07 financial year across 72 schools, it was throwing good money after bad.
But it is not just in education that we see this hypocrisy from the Liberal opposition. Mr Mulcahy is out there arguing—and I am sure he believes it—around efficiency in delivery of government services, yet you have the shadow tourism minister wanting the next million dollars spent in tourism to re-establish a statutory authority for tourism, to invest $1 million in tourism bureaucracy. The first and most important measure for Mr Smyth is that Australian Capital Tourism immediately reinstate a ministerial liaison officer, a DLO for tourism—that is his first priority—and that we set up a bureaucracy to service an independent board. That is the priority in tourism from the Liberal Party: more bureaucracy.
Of the $4½ million that the government saved in tourism, more than $1 million was achieved in administrative savings from rearranging the delivery of services within tourism, and the key area there was ministerial support—HR, administration, finance et cetera through the Shared Services Centre—and the ability to integrate the media unit, for example, into the Department of Territory and Municipal Services as an overall efficiency measure.
Mr Mulcahy: How many did you sack?
MR SPEAKER: Order, Mr Mulcahy!
MR BARR: Indeed, yes—and I do not shy away from that—the number of staff within the tourism authority is less, delivering services more efficiently. You cannot walk both sides of the street. You try desperately to in so many areas, but the hypocrisy of the Liberal Party shows through.
I was attending the Housing Industry Association’s forum with the shadow planning minister only about two or three weeks ago and he sought to highlight what he perceived and was clearly a Liberal Party position around taxation, but then he absolutely refused to acknowledge all of the efforts of this government in seeking to improve administrative efficiency. No, no, he said that that delivered no real savings. In the end, Mr Seselja’s position was that in fact the reorganisation of education delivered no real savings.
Mrs Dunne: Well, it hasn’t yet.
MR BARR: Mrs Dunne, you need only look at the budget papers. You need only look at the fact that this government has been able to reinvest the recurrent savings that have been made in the education portfolio to improve the quality of education in this city. No other government has invested more money in public education than has this government.
The point of undertaking such a significant reform process was to reinvest money in education, and that is exactly what this government has done. The opposition hate it;
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