Page 2531 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 23 August 1994
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FIRE AND EMERGENCY SERVICES CONTRACTS
MR LAMONT (Minister for Urban Services, Minister for Housing and Community Services, Minister for Industrial Relations and Minister for Sport): Madam Speaker, during question time this afternoon I undertook to provide an answer to a question without notice about contracts awarded in Gazette No. 28 of 20 July in relation to ACT Fire and Emergency Services. Staff entitlements resulting from the assistance provided to New South Wales during the January 1994 bushfires would have resulted in considerable payments to those involved. I am advised that that would have been in excess of a quarter of a million dollars. The firefighters agreed to forgo those entitlements in return for assistance in implementing a fitness program. ACT Fire and Emergency Services supports physical fitness for firefighters and this offer provided the opportunity to bring forward the firefighter fitness for duty program. This program is a requirement under negotiations towards a national firefighters award which places emphasis on whole of career fitness for firefighters. It is also consistent with the ACT OH and S legislation and the ACT Fire and Emergency Services program to reduce Comcare commitments in the longer term. The equipment contained in contracts was negotiated with the United Firefighters Union of Australia and acquired through local suppliers.
ESTIMATES 1994-95 - SELECT COMMITTEE
Report on the Appropriation Bill 1994-95
Debate resumed.
MRS CARNELL (Leader of the Opposition) (8.03): Madam Speaker, one of the most interesting or telling points about the Estimates Committee's report was that it was released so late in the evening, at a time when it was very hard for news bulletins to pick it up. Contrary to what Ms Szuty suggested - that the report was somehow not damning of the Government - after reading it again over the dinner break I do not think she has read the same report as the one that members on this side of the house put their names to. This report does damn the Government, and it damns it right from the beginning to the end; right from where we started looking at the 2 per cent budget savings, the sorts of things that were supposed to have happened over the last three years, and asking various areas of government where they were made and how they were made. Very rarely were we able to get a response to that. That certainly has been picked up in this report.
It is interesting that the budget gives such a false view of the Territory's financial situation. I was fascinated, as I am sure was the rest of the Estimates Committee, that the Government could not tell us what the gross debt or the net debt of the Territory was. In fact, they suggested that they would not be able to tell us until September. We could not, for the life of us, work out how they had come up with a budget at all if they did not know what the debt was, whether it be the gross debt or the net debt. They also could not, of course, tell us what the servicing costs of that debt were.
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