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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 5 Hansard (3 May) . . Page.. 1474 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

The suggestion that we are denuding the territory's cash position, for example, is conceded to some degree at least, except we put up in our defence the fact that we are stoking up the territory's investments in exchange for that reduction in cash. The net position of cash and investments from this present financial year to 2004-05 improves from about $1.38 billion to $1.95 billion. So I think any fair observation would be that we have more than adequately catered for the ongoing needs of the ACT over that five-year period. The argument you get quite a lot just before elections, "Oh, we fear the cupboard may be bare when we get to government", does not really cut any mustard in this particular case.

Mr Moore: What they left wasn't an empty cupboard. They had taken the cupboard as well.

MR HUMPHRIES: That is right. Mr Speaker, I want to try to summarise the debate so far. Everybody seems to agree in the debate that our dastardly spending cuts between 1995 and 2000 were dreadful things. They were shocking and they attacked the community; that we went on a rampage that sort of denuded the community of all its dignity. Somehow the, I suppose, rather stupid community voted us back into office in 1998 in the midst of all of this, but, nonetheless, this is the argument; that somehow we have robbed the community of all their programs in the period between then and now. So they do not like our spending cuts in the first six years of office.

They apparently love, more or less, all of our spending promises or spending commitments in the 2001-2002 budget, but no-one seems to put the two things together; that you could not have had the capacity to spend in this financial year coming up without having made the decisions that we made about reducing the cost of running the territory. I suppose that that reconciliation might have occurred does not really align with any reasonable expectation of the way politicians would react in these circumstances.

I want to run through a few comments made in the course of the debate, Mr Speaker. Mr Stanhope repeated the claim that Canberra has fallen behind other states in education funding. He has modified the claim that he made this morning on the ABC radio in the debate I had with him when he said that education spending is being cut under this government. The reality, of course, is that both those things could conceivably be true, both those statements, but one does not confirm the other or contradict the other.

The promise that we made to the ACT community to maintain education spending in real terms has been delivered in full, without the slightest shadow of doubt. In fact, it has been over-delivered. We have, every year we have been in office, maintained spending in real terms, and in some years increased it. Even the Parents and Citizens Council's submission recently on the budget made it clear that over the period of us being in office we have increased education spending in real terms by 1.3 per cent. I think that is the figure that they use. They point out that there has been a decline in education spending over the last 10 years, but of course, Mr Speaker, that occurred entirely during the years of Labor government. So I have to reflect on the irony of Labor thundering about how we have not quite achieved real term maintenance of education spending when each and every year it was in office it cut education spending. Mr Speaker, I do not think our record is flawed, but, if they think it is flawed, I would rather put that record in issue in this coming election campaign than the reality of what the Labor Party has done.

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