Page 3025 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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all the schools. He is clearly the bloke that they go to. He is the “go-to” man when they want some hard decisions made, some cuts made. And he said as much—that Ms Gallagher was not up to the job of making the hard decisions, she could not do it, and they needed Mr Barr.
We all saw the front page of the Canberra Times on budget day, with the picture of Ms Gallagher, and it was not pleasant. In the back pocket I think there was a razor blade for 2010. I wonder whether it will be her or whether, once again, when it comes to doing the dirty work, they will give the job to Mr Barr. We will just have to wait and see whether next year she will actually start making some hard decisions.
With respect to some of the broader problems that we see with the budget, where do you start? One of the aspects that really concern me is the rollovers. This is a government that is not getting the job done. Regardless of the amount of money that is now being appropriated, some $3.7 billion, what we see is that the job is just not getting done. There is $57 million in rollovers in Health alone. And we saw the problems that we are having with the hospital car park—it has been delayed, it is a year late already, it has gone from $29 million to $45 million. As soon as the government gets a little bit spooked by a letter in the Canberra Times—boom! It is called in. Not only is this government spending, and spending without any sense of proportion, but it is also not delivering.
I just reflect on the role of the crossbench in the budget. It was certainly interesting to hear what Ms Hunter had to say.
Ms Hunter: Thank you, Jeremy.
Ms Gallagher: He doesn’t mean it.
MR HANSON: I guess the struggle for the crossbench in some terms is the balance between the ideology that they have—
Ms Hunter: Really? Is he being sarcastic?
MR HANSON: There is a bit of a love-in going on—that they share, the ideology that is shared, and then their desire to see accountability. The problem that the crossbench seem to struggle with is that they do like some of the ideology that is in the budget but they do not like some of the lack of openness and accountability that they are seeing from the government.
In some ways they have been sold out here. What we are seeing is a budget in which the Auditor-General is not going to be funded sufficiently to have ongoing performance audits—they are being cut. With respect to a lot of the measures in the Greens-Labor agreement, such as buses, housing and mental health, they all become a little bit aspirational. (Second speaking period taken.) So the aspirations have become just that. It is a matter of saying: “Yes, trust me. We’ll get there in the end. Sign off on the budget and we’ll get to those in the end.”
But what this budget does not lay out is when we are going to see some of those aspirations, in terms of mental health funding, the 12 per cent, the buses running every
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