Page 2129 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 May 2009
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at lunchtime, snickering and sniggering, whingeing and whispering, the giggle and stink club.
There is little Zdenko—that is right: he was Zdenko at school—running in from the chess club and complaining that mean old Jon Stanhope has been copying his moves. Then there is Jezza. You can see him, nose pressed against the window, waiting to see when Katy parks her bike in the bike rack, and then running in to the attendance office and saying that she is a minute late. You can just see how creepy the girls think he is.
Then there is poor old Victoria, hanging around with the boys, coming in from band practice with the tuba under her arm, huffing and puffing, out of breath, always promising to back a new captain of the club if only they would make her vice-captain, but never quite getting there. Then there is little Al, everyone’s pal, the only kid in the class who wears the school blazer, the only kid who does not take the coat hanger out before he puts his coat on. Then there is sleepy Steve—helmet hair. They usually wake him up at the end of the class to get him out to lunch. Usually, but that is them.
Hang on, there is one more. I forgot. There is always that one kid hanging around: Brendan, the mathlete, getting out his slide rule, practising his tough questions for the teacher after lunch. He never has an answer; he has just got a silly question. He is a small boy—a small, small boy.
The Chief Minister, in a debate about waste management earlier this year, advised the Assembly that, “Some substances are simply too toxic to be recycled.”
MR DOSZPOT (Brindabella) (5.02): The budget as presented by the Stanhope-Gallagher government is a budget with no real answers. It is a budget that leaves all the hard decisions to the department heads and community. It is the “close your eyes and hope for the best” budget. It is a budget that is designed to lull the community into a false sense of security until the axe falls.
It must be said that the government have made good on some election promises, as one would hope they would. It does seem, however, that they have fulfilled just enough promises to keep faith with the Greens and that part of the electorate that did not have the stomach to vote them back in with a majority rule.
We have a new popular set of words being bandied about: “efficiency dividend”. Right up there with “global financial crisis”, this could be the next most regularly used phrase in the ACT government and public service. The Gallagher-Stanhope efficiency dividend: ominous words.
Department heads right now are faced with the challenge of coming up with cuts and savings. The efficiency dividend that needs to be found, starting next year, over the next three years, in the Department of Education and Training alone, is $12 million. The Treasurer is keen to use the least descriptive terminology when referring to these cuts. She says we only need to find one per cent savings across the board, but in reality, in budget paper No 3 on page 100, we see the ominous one per cent equates to $12 million worth of cuts to the education portfolio alone.
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