Page 3832 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 4 December 2007
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in ACT government-owned commercial buildings. I am pleased to see that at least we are starting to have an audit. I have been pushing for that for ages, but you are now having an audit, which is partially done. That is good. And you are going to put some dual-flush toilets in housing. But we are still miles behind other schemes—even schemes in the area such as WaterWise, which has done such sterling service for our neighbours in Queanbeyan. Again, we have an afterthought there.
Afterthought is a hallmark of this second appropriation bill. Many of the expenditures could have—indeed, should have—been picked up in the main budget. Why weren’t they? Was the government too afraid to take a more robust, aggressive approach? Was it its intention just to wait until there was another bucketful of money? Or was the government simply playing catch-up and out of its depth in terms of how it runs its finances?
Some of these measures are good. But let us not forget that this Stanhope Labor government put the people of Canberra through considerable pain in its 2006-07 budget. The Chief Minister lamented that we were living beyond our means. We could not sustain our spending, he cried. We needed to rein in those expenditures, he said; we needed to increase taxes and cut services. What for? So this government could spend and this government could continually, as it still seems to do, get its forecasting so horribly wrong? We do not mind if you are a little bit out, but to be consistently so is an indictment of your ability. That is why we have had this second appropriation bill.
There are good initiatives, some worth supporting, but this is something that should have been dealt with in August.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (11.42): In hearing the comments of those opposite, one could almost believe that they were opposed to almost every element of this budget, this second appropriation, despite the fact that they have already endorsed almost every initiative that has been announced in the lead-up to the appropriation bill in November.
We have this strange contradiction from the opposition. On the one hand, they cannot resist criticising for the sake of criticising; they cannot resist picking at small issues. But when it comes to the big picture, when it comes to the major initiatives—in justice and community safety, in public transport, in health and in education—they have supported all of the key initiatives.
That is because this is a good bill. This is a good Labor government agenda designed to deliver to the community the benefits of strong financial management and the benefits of effective and restrained expenditure, but target the support in areas where it makes a difference for people in our community.
The government is very proud of this bill. We are very proud of the initiatives in this bill and we are proud that they are delivering the services that Canberrans need. I take the challenge to Mr Mulcahy in particular. I do not think he speaks for everyone in the Liberal Party—in fact, we all know he does not—but he does speak for some of them, and he speaks for some of them when he says that he wants to see lower taxes. But I
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