Page 1920 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 May 2010
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His approach, rather than fighting tooth and nail for everything he could for the ACT, as Victoria was doing, as New South Wales was doing, as WA was doing, was to actually say, “Let’s go to the bar.” I think that is an absolute abrogation of the Chief Minister’s responsibilities and is yet again a demonstration that he is a man who has given up and does not really care about what is actually going on in the ACT unless it is to do with his arboretum.
In the capital works program, again, we are seeing about $50 million of slippage this year, which is on the back of $57 million of slippage from last year. So when the government talks about delivering in health, when it talks about the capital asset development plan, then I think we can rightly say it will not be delivered on budget, it will not be delivered on time and it will not be delivered on scope, because it never is.
In fact, I have a list of things that are slipping. They include the women’s and children’s hospital, the adult health inpatient facility, the secure adult mental health unit, the Gungahlin health centre, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander drug and alcohol unit and the TCH multistorey car park as examples. And most of those are not just delayed in this budget but from others.
In terms of other portfolio areas, I notice that there are additional police officers. And I welcome those. But they are not front-line police in terms of addressing the violence that we have in our community, the assaults, the break and enters, the car thefts. They are not actually front-line police officers. Although they are in there and are going to be getting lots of revenue so that they are cost neutral, it is yet another way this government is grabbing revenue from the community. But what I do note is that there are no additional police, essentially, on the beat.
In terms of corrections, there is a slight increase in corrections funding but there is nothing that we can see that is actually going to address the issue, and that is that we are paying more for corrections in the ACT than anybody else and each prisoner is costing us in the order of $504 a day.
In the time that I have left, I really reiterate the point that this is not a budget for today, it is not a budget for the future. Again, we are going to pay more, we are going to wait longer and we are going to get less.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (4.40): Madam Assistant Speaker, today we have heard in this debate the Canberra Liberals’ acknowledgement that the economy is strong.
Mr Hanson: The economy is strong.
MRS DUNNE: The economy is strong; it is a shame about the budget. That is the message. We have heard that the woes of the global financial crisis are largely behind us. We have heard that employment in the ACT is strong, with high participation rates and low unemployment rates. We have heard that inflation is pretty much under control. We have heard that ACT revenues are stronger than ever before. Indeed, they are so strong that by 2013-14 they will be the most ever collected by the territory. And we have heard that territory expenses are to grow even higher, such that deficits are to continue and borrowings are to increase.
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