Page 2094 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 May 2009
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cost of this policy, which was utterly rejected by Treasury, must leave him with a bad taste in his mouth.
We welcome the fact of smaller class sizes. The sad truth is: the motivation was not an insight into sound educational policy; it is because the polling came back and the numbers were bad. Here we see a classic example of how the Liberal Party was leading the way in this town and the Labor Party used deceit and deception to attempt to grab the credit. Despite there being funding for 70 new teachers in this latest budget, this will not reduce class sizes for all classes to the optimum of 21 students. We have already seen debate start over what “average” means but once again there is a scant lack of detail or accountability on this promise.
However, in the next four years, the government will need to find $12 million in efficiencies. The government needs to outline what areas of education delivery will be affected by these savings. Additionally, funding for primary and secondary education will go backwards in 2010-11. Tertiary education spending is cut in 2009-10. We see it in a number of other areas. Vocational education funding goes backwards in 2012-13.
There are, of course, as with any budget where the government is spending $3½ billion of our money, a number of items in this budget that are worth supporting and we will say so. I will outline some of these.
Maternity leave is one. We support the measures to extend paid maternity leave. We said so during the election campaign and we will support it now. In fact, I will go further and call on the federal government to introduce a national scheme for maternity leave.
It is good to see that the GDE will finally be duplicated, after we were told just last year by John Hargreaves that it did not need to happen for five to 10 years. The money allocated in this budget, $83 million, is more than the entire budget to build the entire road if they had constructed it completely at the beginning of the process. This is just another example of this government’s way to save money. When we announced our intention to end the procrastination and fix the mess Labor had made, it was instantly matched, magically. Once again, it was an election year; there was a promise from the Liberals; and lo and behold, the Labor Party finally saw sense.
Mr Hargreaves: Which alignment were you going to do it on?
MR SESELJA: The right one. The Canberra Liberals support the spending on a range of areas identified in the budget in the area of health. They include mammography, preventative health programs, community health facilities, mental health and improving surgery capacity and health workforce development. These are some of the areas of health which we particularly list. There are a number of others.
Unfortunately, there is no plan to address the risks. There are clearly risks to this fragile budget and, although they are recognised as such in the documents, nowhere do we find a robust plan to deal with them should any of the contingencies arise.
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