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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 2 Hansard (9 March) . . Page.. 415 ..

MR STEFANIAK

However, as with so many of these achievements, they come at some cost. We have had to increase our hire costs for sports facilities because there was simply no capacity to continue to maintain those facilities without a higher contribution from the users. It is important to note that these increased costs, which I am pleased to say have been accepted in a very commendable and very mature way by the sports community, have brought the cost recovery rate for the ACT up to the level that applies in the rest of Australia. The fact that that community has accepted those increased rates is, perhaps, an indication that we should look at raising costs and charges in certain other areas.

Where do we go from here? I am not suggesting that we should break the commitments we have made to the maintenance of funding in education, but I do think that we need to recognise that we have finite resources and that we are limited in our ability to spend more. What we must do is ensure that what we get for our expenditure is of the very best quality. We must make every effort to keep our lead in areas such as information technology. We must continue our emphasis on the provision of vocational education in schools. We have an enviable lead over the other States in programs such as our computers for teachers program and the acceptance of vocational education in the senior secondary curriculum. These are programs which ensure that we are and remain the clever, caring capital. We must maintain our efforts in providing assistance to the Canberra sporting community to keep our participation rates the highest in Australia and to provide excellent facilities that encourage sports tourism and major sporting events to be played in Canberra. Let us not forget the additional benefits to our health system and the health of the Canberra community which derive from our outstanding sport participation numbers.

Sadly, there will always be a need for any ACT government to provide assistance to the less fortunate in our community. That is something we cannot ever resile from. However, we cannot do all of these things effectively on an indefinite basis if we continue to overspend. We do have to look at ways of spending within our means. I would think that going along in the same old way is simply not a real option. We do not have natural resources such as goldmines and oilwells, a substantial primary production capability or anything like that. Our greatest resource is our people. We have an educated population here. We have a number of opportunities, but we do have limited options in terms of just how much revenue we can actually rake in. So, going along in the same old way of constantly spending more than we earn is not an option. If someone did that with a household budget, they would ultimately lose their house. It is simply not viable.

I hope that this debate is the start of some real lateral thinking on how best to tackle our budget problems. If we can put petty political biases aside and at least try to work together, instead of point-scoring here, we really will have achieved something of which we can all be justly proud.

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