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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 925 ..
MR HIRD (continuing):
As I said when I opened my remarks, I am on five standing committees and only one of them gives me heartache and problems. That is because the people opposite, particularly Mr Berry and Ms Tucker, push their own barrows, rather than taking into consideration the full picture. Before I sit down, I would like to thank all the witnesses who appeared before the committee and the secretary of the committee.
MR MOORE (Minister for Health and Community Care) (11.19): I rise to deal with a number of issues coming out of the report. The one that is most fundamental to me is the issue that Mr Berry raised and offered a challenge to me about, that is, the guarantee of funding in real terms. I must say that I am very pleased that an independent arbiter, KPMG, has now looked at that and reported on it - I know that Mr Stefaniak will go through it in detail - and has verified that the Government has, as it has always claimed, managed to deliver real terms funding. I think that it is important to have a history lesson on this issue because Mr Berry sits there and accuses me of doing away with my principles. Why did we come to this position where, first of all, the Labor Party and then the Liberal Party actually guaranteed real term funding in going to an election? It goes back to 1993.
Mr Stefaniak: Did they, too?
MR MOORE: I believe that they did. In 1993, Labor in government set about cutting education funding. They set about cutting, as I recall, 90 teaching positions. I made it very clear at the time that if they proceeded down that path I would consider that to be reprehensible conduct and reprehensible conduct was enough for me to lose confidence in the Chief Minister at the time. Ms Szuty, my colleague in the Assembly at that time, agreed with me on that position. In other words, we made it very clear to the Labor Government that we would not support their budget, that it would be the end of the Labor Government if they proceeded to cut education funding. Mr Berry, a Minister at that time, wanted to cut education, and he set about doing it. He provided for it in the budget. That is what the debate was about. That is how this got started.
I went into the next election saying, "From now on, I want to make it really clear that if someone sets out to cut school funding" - not education funding - "they will lose my confidence". I considered that to be reprehensible conduct. Indeed, I went through the next few years and the next two elections putting that down as part of my election platform. The Liberal Party, presumably wanting to come back into government and recognising that that clearly would be a demand from the crossbenchers, said, "If we are going to have that demand made on us, let us at least put it in our platform and go for the same thing". But the reality is that the reason the school budgets have been protected is that I took that stance.
Mr Berry: Ha, ha!
MR MOORE:
For Mr Berry, who now laughs, to stand here and accuse me of losing principles is for him to forget the history. The history is very clear. It was Labor's attempt to cut the school education budget when Wayne Berry was a Minister of the Government that brought about this approach. That is exactly what brought about this approach. What is more, I am very comfortable in standing here and saying to this Assembly without any fear of misleading that I have maintained my promise. I would
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