Page 364 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 20 February 1990
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MR STEFANIAK: He is a little Aussie battler who really represents the interests of ordinary working Australians. It will be interesting to see the result. In the rest of the community in Australia, outside the ACT, people in the mortgage belt are hurting. Both husband and wife have to go out to work. Sometimes people have to have two jobs just to make ends meet, just to ensure that they can bring up their families, that they can keep the mortgage that is on their homes. Mortgage rates have gone through the roof. What a wonderful job the Hawke Government has done with the economy! We have not only gone down the Argentinean road, but we have also surpassed Argentina.
Mr Duby: What's wrong with Argentina?
MR STEFANIAK: It is doing much better than us. We are so much in debt that it is unreal. In the ACT we have talked recently about saving $100m, and we have the Priorities Review Board to do that. What has been done federally? There is a deficit budget and borrowing. We simply cannot pay for ourselves any more because of the incompetence of this Hawke Government. I think that people of Australia realise that; they are hurting. At the next election they will toss out the Hawke Government and elect the Liberal-National Party coalition.
Adjournment Debates
MR DUBY (Minister for Finance and Urban Services) (9.32): Mr Speaker, I rise on behalf of the Canberra citizens in the gallery of this Assembly to say how disgusted I am with the efforts of Mr Berry and the other members on the other side who, in the last week of sitting, have tried to generate, in this Assembly of the ACT, election fever in connection with the Federal election. We do not come here to discuss the economic policies of the Federal Government or the New South Wales Government or the Tasmanian Government. We come here to talk about the matters that really are of concern to normal people in the ACT.
We have noticed in the last week, ever since there has been election fever on the hill, that obviously the days of Labor Party people getting their instructions from Moscow have gone; obviously they get instructions from the bunkers in the hill. The word goes out, "Let's get an election fever going. Let's start getting issues going so that we can praise Ros Kelly, Bob McMullan and John Langmore". In the right forum undoubtedly praise can be heaped on those folk and other representatives, such as Margaret Reid, but this is not the place for it.
In this Assembly we are supposed to be representing the interests of Canberra citizens. We are not here to try to generate election fever, to make it look good so that they can go to party meetings with copies of Hansard and say,
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