Page 3850 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 8 November 1994
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MR WOOD (Minister for Education and Training, Minister for the Arts and Heritage and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (9.36) in reply: Madam Speaker, the Liberals' contribution to this debate on my very short cultural statement was rather like their contribution to the previous debate, on women's policy. Having no policy themselves, having absolutely no record of achievement themselves, what do they do but set about on the basis that attack is the best form of defence. On two occasions in the last half-hour, we heard a lot of nonsense from the Liberals simply because they have no policy.
Let me highlight that. Mr Humphries mentioned Mr Keating's cultural statement. He has probably forgotten - and I can understand that - that a week, or two, or three before Mr Keating's statement, the Federal Opposition Leader brought down the Liberals' cultural statement. Where is it now? It has sunk into oblivion. It was a flimsy, empty document, by any comparison, and especially by comparison with Mr Keating's statement; it is as nothing. The Liberals are culturally bare, and there is no greater illustration of that contrast than those two documents. The same applies at the Territory level. The contrast between what this Government has done and what the Liberals mouth is remarkable indeed. There is no comparison. We have an outstanding record in the arts, and I am proud to stand up and promote that.
While I am in a critical mode, I might criticise Ms Szuty, because I think that she was trying to have things both ways. She told me that she did not want the "dead hand" - and I put that in inverted commas - of bureaucracy; yet two or three minutes before she had said how great it was to appoint a cultural planner who will be a bureaucrat. I cannot quite put those two together, Ms Szuty. Should I not have appointed that cultural planner?
Earlier in Ms Szuty's contribution - which was, I might say, rather more substantial than the one from the other side of the chamber - she congratulated me, as I recall, for appointing the Cultural Council as a body to attend to a whole lot of policy matters. Then, when it came to grants, she was talking about "a coterie of public servants". The public servants do not make those decisions; the Cultural Council does. It is not just the Cultural Council; it is the cultural council with a large number of panels of peers that makes those decisions.
Ms Szuty cannot have it both ways. She cannot say that the Cultural Council is great and, by inference, all the activity that it generates is great, and then claim that there is a coterie of bureaucrats stifling development. It just does not happen that way. It is not the way that the council has been established. It does not work that way. It is genuine peer assessment. Only yesterday, I announced a round of grants; and there are more to come. It has been a long, hard involvement by committees labouring, agonising, and, with inspiration, deciding the best way that grants might be distributed.
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