Page 3455 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 18 August 2010
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revolution program. The computers in schools program will be shut down by the Liberals if they win government this weekend. Do we see Mr Seselja standing up for the right of students in ACT schools to have access to the latest communications technology? Perhaps, like Mr Abbott, he thinks computers are only ever used for downloading music clips or forging Facebook accounts.
Mr Speaker, the Liberals have form. When they were last in office federally, they slashed the public service by 32,400 jobs across the country. The impact to the ACT was a 2.3 per cent decline in employment, a 3.5 per cent fall in average house prices and a fall in population. Let us put the risk posed by the Liberals into proper perspective. They will do to our town what the big banks of the world could not, and the Seselja Liberals will sit by and watch it happen.
The ACT housing market proved resilient throughout the recent economic downturn, but all this could change, and quickly. Many of those who have recently entered our housing market are first homebuyers with large mortgages. A 1996-style fall in our housing market will mean that some of these Canberrans may find that they have negative equity in their homes, and those are the lucky ones—the ones who still have jobs.
What we have seen recently over the course of the GFC is that when the ACT economy suffers, those Canberrans that are already doing it tough are pushed over the edge. Before the GFC, one of our best-known community organisations was conducting its work on about $200,000 in annual funding. When the GFC hit, the demand on its services grew to more than $430,000 over a period of just six months. Another community organisation experienced a spike in demand of 61 per cent, and that was a crisis that did not involve the loss of anything like 12,000 jobs. That did not see the commonwealth strip billions out of our economy. All of this, and I have not even touched on health.
Listen up, Mr Hanson, and acknowledge what Mr Abbott is planning to do if your Liberal government wins government this weekend. At the very least, we need a strong commonwealth public service to deliver health services in the community. This year under the Labor government we saw the creation of a national registration and accreditation scheme. The adoption of the national scheme in the ACT has created national, consistent, rigorous registration and accreditation arrangements and will improve public protection through the regulation of health practitioners and students across the nation.
If you are struggling to think about what will happen to us, just think about our health system. You were talking about this health system yesterday ad infinitum. Yet you will stand by and let Mr Abbott neglect our health system when he strips back funding, and he will do it. The Liberal government have done it in the past and they will do it again in a flash.
On national health reform, we as a nation are at the tail end of the first stage of a historic agreement on how to better fund and manage the growing health system across the country. Our national health reform needs a chance. Through the strength of the federal Labor government and its dedicated public service, the ACT has already
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