Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 4 Hansard (18 April) . . Page.. 1071 ..

MR HUMPHRIES: We have been told to change it. If we do not change our point of view, of course we are open to all sorts of calamitous results. That is up to the Assembly to deliver. But I would respectfully suggest - and I know that it is not going to be particularly important as everyone rushes to deliver the Government a black eye; I notice that you all want to do this - that it is illogical to ask the Assembly not just to request but to require the Government, on pain of dismissal, to revise its point of view.

Ms McRae: You would prefer a censure? We will give you a censure.

MR HUMPHRIES: You can censure us if you want. That is also open to you.

Mr Osborne: Do not hurt his feelings.

MR HUMPHRIES: We have no feelings left in this place; I assure you. Our nerve endings were long since snuffed out by repetitive torture. Our nerves have receded back into the far recesses of our spinal cords. We do not have any nerves left. The fact is that what the Assembly is doing is illogical; you cannot require someone to change their point of view. It is philosophically unsound to do that. However, I acknowledge that, from speaking to a number of people whose sensory capacity to hear is diminished as much as our feeling is diminished, I make that point probably to a vacuous void.

MR WOOD (12.32): Mr Speaker, I will be brief, and I will talk on points already raised by Mr Stefaniak and Mr Humphries; that is, their continuing fiction about what they have done sometimes. We heard the fiction of 18,000 jobs - and that was taken up by some aspects of the media - the misrepresentation, if I can use that word, that the Government expressed earlier this week. But there is a fiction out that the Government increased the education budget in the current year's budget. The Government did not do that. They started from the base of the previous year's Labor budget; they added $7.7m for the CPI; they added $2m for increased enrolments, which is routine and is not an increased expenditure to cater for new students; then they added $4.7m for new activities. You cannot claim that as increased expenditure. I think it was transferred activities rather than new activities. Someone lost $4.7m somewhere else, and that was put into the education budget; it is as simple as that. Now they stand up and say, "We have increased expenditure". At the end of the day, the education budget, as Mr Moore pointed out last year, did not have enough money to pay the increased salaries bill. You did not increase funding by the proportion that you claim or by the proportion that was required to increase it over and above the measure provided the previous year. You carefully distorted this, as you do so often.

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (12.34): I was not going to speak, but I could not allow it to go past without it being corrected. I want to set this Assembly straight and the record straight. The appropriation for 1994-95 was $192.2m. The real terms increase at 4 per cent, the figure which we put into the budget all the way through, which was a figure we used for the CPI, was $7.7m; additional enrolments, $2m; additional functions, $4.7m. That came to an appropriation of $206.6m. That $206.6m, as other members of the Government have said, is the most, by a country mile, that has ever been appropriated for education since self-government. I rose to correct the comment that Mr Wood made. I hope that he will now apologise to the Assembly.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .