Page 1649 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 29 May 1990
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Commonwealth additional funding for the Territory and she says that nobody believed him. I took Senator Walsh to be a man of integrity. I believe that he was then and I believe that he is now. The fact that he has been disowned by his Labor colleagues does not affect his integrity. I accept his word. He is in a better position than any of you on the other side of this house to determine the figure.
Having got that figure, our problem is how to get from where we are now to where we are going to be on 30 June next year. Now, contrary to what the present Opposition members did when they were in government, this Government is absolutely determined not to make ad hoc, knee-jerk decisions about how to go about fixing it. Our problem is to find the underlying causes of our budgetary situation and to attack the underlying causes, not to attack the symptoms.
The fact is that identifying the full range of options which might be available to the Government was something that we did not have the internal resources to deal with. For that reason I sought and obtained external advice from people with the experience and the qualifications to look at the way this ACT Administration does its business and to give us independent, external advice as to where the problems lay and how we could go about fixing them.
The simple answer is that, despite the excellence of the members of the ACT Government Service, they have not the resources internally to be able to deal with that kind of inquiry. That is not their job. They have got full-time jobs now and they could not carry on their full-time jobs and perform this inquiry that has just been completed. I think it would have been unreasonable and unrealistic to have expected our public service managers to take that task on as well as continuing to run the Territory.
So, first of all, we needed the information. We had to get it in a form that would be acceptable to the community. It had to be independent advice. It had to be advice from people who were qualified to make the judgments - and I believe that this is the case - and it had to be provided by people who had the time and the opportunity to acquire the information, put it together and then produce some comprehensive recommendations. That is what we needed and that is what we have done.
School Consolidations
MR BERRY: My question is directed to Mr Humphries. Incidentally, Mr Speaker, he informed 100 or so people at a school meeting last night that the Chief Minister opposite was responsible for some of the input to the last three Grants Commission inquiries, which probably explains some of the figures that we are having so much difficulty with.
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