Page 1238 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 9 April 2008
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in community services, in health and in education. But in order to achieve those worthy social goals, it is a requirement—as unfortunate as it is and as much as people do not like paying tax—that there is a collective community contribution to ensure that we are able to deliver services. But I believe very firmly that it is then incumbent upon government to deliver those services effectively.
Through my time in the education portfolio and in the tourism portfolio—and I look forward with some interest to the next matter before the Assembly and Mr Smyth’s position on this—it is my experience that you do have to look very critically at how you are delivering services and being more efficient. That means returning savings to the budget, which we most certainly did in 2006, 2007 and in 2008 through both the education and tourism portfolios, in particular, by delivering services more efficiently. You undertake those reforms, yet throughout there is such opposition to more efficient service delivery.
We see a call in the next motion for a restoration of funding to tourism, and we see through the various comments of Dr Foskey that, even when we are investing more in areas of pastoral care or languages or a range of other areas in the education portfolio, it is never enough and that there must always be more. But the challenge, of course—and that is a challenge that you can only really face when you are sitting around the table in the cabinet room seeking to put together a budget—is how you achieve so much more within the limited resources that you have. That is a difficult challenge, one that I do not think Dr Foskey will ever experience in her career. I think Mr Mulcahy may well have dealt himself out of that possibility as well, as much as I admire his ideological purity, but we will see what happens there.
For those people opposite, who put themselves forward as the alternative government in the ACT, to suggest that, on top of all of the other significant commitments that have been made—and I understand that Mr Mulcahy costed those when he was shadow Treasurer as in the order of about $200 million a year—if you include this $17 million—and I will have to check with Mr Mulcahy whether this was, in fact, part of his $200 million costing—the ability of the ACT government to continue not only to meet future service needs but to continue just at the current level of service delivery whilst ripping $200 million out, either on the taxation side or by $200 million of new initiatives, would be affected. I note, Mr Deputy Speaker, your particular interest in light rail, for example, and a commitment that you gave on behalf of the Liberal opposition on ABC radio last year that you would give serious consideration to a $900 million investment in light rail.
So, you see, portfolio by portfolio, as each of the shadow ministers within the Liberal Party decide that when it comes down to a difficult political decision—”will I be backing efficient service delivery or will I try and score the cheap political point?”—it is the cheap political point every time. But the thing is that the people of Canberra are not fooled. They know that when it comes ultimately to making a decision in October of this year it is not possible to simultaneously add $200 million worth of new expenditure or revenue reductions and seek either to maintain or further enhance service delivery, that you cannot do both and that at some point the Liberal opposition will have to stop walking both sides of the street.
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