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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 4102 ..

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister and Minister for Health and Community Care) (1.14 am): Mr Speaker, there was an overrun in the health budget, as everybody would know. We never tried to hide it. In fact, we brought it back and there was a second appropriation of $14.5m. That $14.5m was voted for by this Assembly. Mr Speaker, Mr Berry blew out four budgets in four years; he cut 200 hospital beds; and he doubled the waiting list. I think the very sad thing for Mr Berry is that he just cannot handle the situation that we really are addressing a lot of the fundamental problems. It is very sad to see somebody that bitter and twisted about something as important as health.

Mr Berry just said something very interesting, and I would like to finish on this note. He said he could not possibly vote for this health budget. That obviously means that Mr Berry believes that this budget should be lower, that he believes that we should have cut the budget. The line of the appropriation does not say where we are spending it. It is just a total figure.

Mr Berry: No; it is the manager that I have troubles with.

MRS CARNELL: You are not voting for the manager; you are voting for the dollars, Mr Berry. The reality is that Mr Berry has just indicated to this Assembly that he would cut the health budget. The fact is that we believe this is the right way to go.

Proposed expenditure agreed to.

Part 8 - Department of Business, the Arts, Sport and Tourism

Proposed expenditure - Business and Regional Development, $13,198,000

(Quorum formed)

MS McRAE (1.17 am): Mr Speaker, this element of the budget contains funding for the Bureau of Sport, Recreation and Racing. The Government often talks about how much money it gives to this area. It has a new tax which allows money to be given to this area, and it is an area that the Government can rightly be proud of. However, during the Estimates Committee process we found out that we really can have no confidence in the Government's capacity to prioritise its spending. In fact, we are unable to have any faith that what is put in front of us is what is going to end up at the end of the year. We discovered, perhaps less than a month before the budget, that $250,000 was magically available for a futsal stadium. We do not know where it came from. We had never heard of it. We woke up one morning and saw in Pryor's brilliant cartoon that, like a mushroom, there was this futsal stadium. We all thought that they were fixing the car park; but, no, it was a futsal stadium.

Last year at Estimates Committee time, when we asked, we were given a 10-year plan for sporting facilities. So, of course, what did we do? We found our 10-year plan. We looked at page one, we looked at page 2, we looked at page 3, we looked at page 4, and we kept looking. Nowhere in the 10-year plan, from beginning to end, could we find

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