Page 418 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 27 June 1989
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
note, Mr Speaker. I would like the Government to clarify what its intentions are and I look forward to the budget so that we can really see what its priorities are.
MR WOOD (3.46): Mr Speaker, there is much that is happening in this Assembly that is historic, and I want to dwell on that word for a moment - with some trepidation, I suppose, in the presence of the learned historian who sits opposite me. This Supply Bill is the essential ingredient in our step to self-government. We are getting full control of our money.
It takes from our consolidated revenue the control of money - the expenditure of the money indicated. Clearly it is the end of an era of dependence. The final phase of that dependence was the operation in the last month or so of the trust account. That is about to finish, and indeed finishes on 30 June.
This, perhaps, is an appropriate occasion, considering its importance, to make a brief reference to the immense amount of effort that has been devoted in the last few years to putting our finances into an understandable form. You may recall in earlier years if you wanted to know what was being spent in the ACT you had to delve into this department and that, and somewhere else, and go all over the place trying to find out in total and in part what the expenditure and income patterns were for the ACT. The Deputy Chief Minister, who has had a heavy involvement, might remember how many departments we had to go into.
Mr Whalan: About 17.
MR WOOD: Seventeen or so. It was a very considerable effort, and it was also a very considerable effort to extract all that and put it into a single document, into a single form, into the ACT budget which was done for the first time in the financial year just ending. I want to pay some tribute to all those people in the bureaucracy, in both the ACT Administration and the Federal bureaucracy, who have had some role in doing that. It has been a very large task and it is one which we can now develop and appreciate as we take this on ourselves.
There has been another process occurring over recent years, one that has caused some hardship in the ACT, but an inevitable process and one about which I believe we cannot justly argue. That is the outcome of the Grants Commission's findings and the movement to put the Territory's financial arrangements into a line comparable with the States. That movement has been going on for some time, as we know, and it will continue.
The point I want to make is that that will continue regardless of the fact of self-government. I am not sure that every person in the broader community understands that that process is occurring. The Government faces the task of framing this year's budget and subsequent budgets in the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .