Page 401 - Week 01 - Thursday, 11 December 2008
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the best use of taxpayers’ money. There is $5.6 million for regional facilities. This is obviously something that is tied to the school closures saga, and we have seen that this is essentially the pay-off. This is the pay-off for getting rid of school communities, and we all know how badly that was handled.
We see that the government has put forward this legislation and has claimed that it is urgent. We acknowledge that some parts of it are urgent, but we would also point out that a number of parts of this appropriation are not urgent. They could be properly considered; they could be properly examined by the Assembly. We have not been given that opportunity. Even when we wanted to have a debate about why it was urgent or why it was not, we got gagged. That was very disappointing. But we particularly believe that the spending of $35 million of taxpayers’ money should be properly scrutinised. We have not been given that opportunity.
The final point I want to make is that during the election campaign we took the time to make savings. We were roundly criticised by the Labor Party for that decision. There were hysterical claims from the Chief Minister. I think we were going to cancel Christmas, kill Kenny Koala, as well as put hundreds of people out of their jobs, if you believed Jon Stanhope. None of this was true. The Treasury analysis, in fact, confirmed that there would be no redundancies as a result of our changes.
Of course, we know that Jon Stanhope does not understand this because we remember when he said, “I was quite shocked to see how much the public service had grown.” We know that you can make savings by not allowing the same level of growth in the forward estimates. And that was what we were doing. We were making responsible savings during a time when we all knew that there was a downturn coming. We knew from the headlines that there was a downturn coming. We needed to make savings, and we stated it at the time. We said: “We know difficult times are coming. We need to make savings. We need to spend responsibly.”
The position that has been expressed by the Treasurer and others on the other side of the chamber is essentially that any government spending is good government spending. They will use the financial crisis as an excuse for reckless spending. What we say is: find savings in the areas of waste. Find savings in areas like government advertising, which we identified; in the growth of certain units, in some of the internal policy and spin parts of government. Find savings there so that you have actually got the money to stimulate the economy; you have actually got the space to put money where it is needed, when it is needed, rather than just saying, “Any spending is good spending.’
Whether it is on advertising, whether it is on PR, whatever it is, this government and the Labor Party now appear to be saying that any spending is good spending. We disagree with them. They criticised us roundly for our position on making cuts. They made hysterical claims about our cuts, which were all wrong. They were all proven wrong. In fact, the Treasury figures and the Treasury analysis show that if there were redundancies, they would have to have figures that quantified the cost of those redundancies. They were not there. If the Treasurer gets up and says that we were going to cut jobs, she will be questioning her own Treasury officials and their own analysis.
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