Page 3613 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 16 October 1990
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Weetangera Primary School
MR WOOD: I direct a question to the Chief Minister. Chief Minister, your Education Minister has repudiated the commitment of the Federal Government in 1988 that Weetangera Primary School will stay open for at least the next five years on the grounds that - and I quote from his document:
The promise of the then Government cannot be honoured as we are now in a period of financial constraints and the need of the whole system needs to be addressed.
I refer you, Chief Minister, to your statement in budget paper No. 2 that you will allocate $2.5m from ACT sources to be used to fulfil the pre-self-government commitment by the Commonwealth to assist with the capital and interest costs associated with St Peter's Catholic College in Tuggeranong. Chief Minister, what is the difference between these commitments, that you can accept one and reject the other?
MR KAINE: Mr Wood was clearly being quite naive in even asking the question. The difference - - -
Members interjected.
MR KAINE: I presume Mr Wood asked the question because he wanted an answer. You might ask him to do me the courtesy of listening to it. The difference - - -
Mr Berry: We are tetchy today.
MR KAINE: And, of course, Mr Berry does not want to hear the answer to anything, because any answer that I give shows how incompetent he was when he was a Minister. The answer to the question is quite clear. In case it has escaped Mr Wood's notice, there has been a major change in the ACT since the Commonwealth made an undertaking in 1988, and the change is that we have been given self-government. And we have been given self-government under the undertaking that we very quickly make the transition to the normal Commonwealth-State financial relationship; we will have no special relationship as we have had in the past. That means that we have to confront the issue of what we as a community can actually afford. We cannot work on the basis of what the Commonwealth provided in the past, when revenues were of no relevance whatsoever to what was spent in the ACT. That is the difference, Mr Wood. If you want a little lesson on economics I am quite happy to take you aside privately and explain it to you.
Until the Commonwealth gives us an undertaking that it will maintain its commitments prior to self-government in this Territory, over and above the commitments that this Government can afford to undertake, we will continue to
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