Page 1163 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 22 August 1989
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
of the sort of advantage that you had by virtue of the training you did, by virtue of the time you gave up and by virtue of your profession. So, in fact, when the accord was agreed to there were two choices for these earners in terms of productivity. They had to take either wage cuts or job cuts across their union because that was the agreement that they got involved with.
I believe that that is one of the problems with the whole budgeting approach of the Labor Government, and it is one of the problems that is coming to a head at the moment with the pilots strike. I do not put them in exactly the same category as the people we have got there, but they probably feel the same frustration about going backwards, about productivity, about losing their position.
And what does that mean locally? That means locally for our budgeting that we can also sit back and watch those professions go backwards and, as we also make cuts to the areas of health and education particularly, then we can perceive that there will be a further reduction in the position of those particular members of our society. Those areas of the budget happen to be particularly important areas for anybody with a long-term view of what is going to happen in Canberra. Education and health are very, very important to our whole well-being as a territory. Therefore, the relationship of the ACT budget with the Federal budget has to be taken very much in the light of those comments that I have just made.
MR JENSEN (4.23): I have a few short comments to make in relation to this particular matter. The Federal Government's grab for the grey power vote is of interest to the ACT, I would suggest, with its ageing population and increasing popularity as a retirement area. I know that is one area that my colleague Dr Kinloch and other members of the Social Policy Committee will be looking at with great interest.
However, the $2 increase to single pensions above normal indexation is an insult. Increases in rent assistance and indexation of rent allowance from March 1991 are in themselves only of marginal help in these stringent economic situations.
The abolition of income tax for all pensioners from 1995 is little more than a cynical exercise of mortgaging the future for short-term political gain. I suggest that a number of the commentaries in that particular area were related to that and I feel sure that those in that particular category in the ACT will see through that sort of cynical political exercise.
Let me turn quickly to capital works. We see that for the ACT they are down from $200m to $160m despite the Chief Minister's rationalisation that the ACT Government's capital works take the total to $215m. The Commonwealth clearly has a declining financial interest in the development of the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .