Page 1916 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 May 2010
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Mrs Dunne: For some of your bulky waste collection.
MR HARGREAVES: Somebody certainly is involved with waste and it would have to be the Liberal Party. They are the experts in waste. Madam Assistant Speaker, this is a responsible budget in trying times. This is a responsible budget in uncertain times. I commend the budget to the Assembly.
MR HANSON (Molonglo) (4.25): What an honour it is to follow that fine speech! It is just as well, Mr Hargreaves, that the government is investing in Brindabella because they are certainly not getting value for money from you as their member.
In terms of speeches, though, I would like to commend the Leader of the Opposition, firstly, for the great speech that he gave today, that I thought was a very insightful analysis of the mistakes that have been made by this government not only in this budget but in the budgets prior, in the eight leading up to this one. It was a very fine speech. I commend Mr Smyth also for his insightful comments.
When we turn to speeches, if those of us that were at the budget breakfast reflect back—I do not think Mr Hargreaves was there; he was still in bed—it was a turning point in the community and certainly in the business community. If you saw what happened there, Jon Stanhope was largely irrelevant. He was sitting there; all he seemed to be concerned about was the arboretum, which is clearly a legacy project of his; attacking groups that had dared criticise his budget; making flippant remarks about closing schools being easier than cutting down trees. Quite clearly, the man has become irrelevant.
So what was left was for Katy Gallagher to deliver her “it’s not my fault” speech: “It is not my fault that the budget is so uninspired and it is not my fault that it is going into deficit because it is the GST or the GFC. They are both to blame.”
But when Zed Seselja spoke on the budget breakfast morning, he stripped away the spin. He stripped away the deceit of this government that has been saying it has not had enough money and crying poor and he proved quite clearly that this government has got more money coming in in revenue than it ever expected, than ever came in during the boom times. My expectation is that, by the end of this budget period, it will have twice as much money in revenue per annum than it had when it came into power.
So there was an actual shift in mood in the Press Club that morning. What actually occurred was that Katy Gallagher gave her speech and people were listening. I think that Katy Gallagher can deliver a sort of sense of reassurance and that is what she does.
But what happened was that, when Zed spoke, it stripped away the deceit; it stripped away the excuses; and she was left with nothing. The amount of people that have been contacting my office, and I imagine that of the other members of the ACT Liberals, to say that was a real turning point is significant. “We now understand where you are at and we are confident that you have got a good chance of being the next government and we are behind you.” The number of people who come into my office is significant.
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