Page 1432 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 May 2006
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await with interest the final outcome for this financial year. It may be that we will be able to announce our fifth consecutive surplus budget.
I go to the point about the delivery of surplus budgets at a time and in an environment where we were left with a range of significantly neglected areas, areas that we inherited from the Liberal government previously in power. Let us go to those. Most particularly, the neglected areas of priority service were disability services, mental health services and child protection services. The Gallop report is sobering reading today and should be noted in the context of this debate. We should go back to the Gallop report and the finding of Justice Gallop in the commission of inquiry into the provision of disability services under the Liberal government.
Mr Mulcahy: For how many years are you going to keep trotting that out?
MR STANHOPE: For how many years have we had to make up for the neglect? Do you walk away from the Gallop report and do you walk away from the Vardon report as testament to the neglect by your government of services for some of the most vulnerable in our society, our abused children? The investments in disability and in child protection, in the context of Mr Mulcahy’s motion, were a “wasting of public funds on seeking to satisfy the interests of a select few”. That is how the motion reads and that, of course, sits well with Mr Mulcahy’s and the Liberal Party’s philosophy. The motion attacks the government for “wasting public funds on seeking to satisfy the interests of a select few”, the select few being, of course, abused children; the select few being, of course, people with a disability; the select few being, of course, people with a mental illness.
The government inherited aged and disability services and child protection services that were unfunded by any standard. In 2000-01, and Mr Smyth will attest to this, the ACT was spending less than 60 per cent of what was considered at that time to be an average level of expenditure to provide an average level of service in aged and disability services. That is your record; less than 60 per cent of what was required to meet average levels of expenditure. When we came to government we inherited wage provisions in the budget of far less than the consumer price index in an environment in which you had bids on the table in your enterprise bargaining negotiations. You did not even budget for the consumer price index, let alone the offers that you were making in your negotiations. That is what we inherited.
Let’s go through them. In relation to aged and disability services, it was 60 per cent less than average levels of expenditure. Wage provision was not even for the CPI. We inherited the nurses dispute, which had the potential to compromise and was compromising health services, and we inherited a range of promises which, when we got to government, we found were completely unfunded and for which, of course, there was no provision, such as the medical school and, most ironically, the jail, a Liberal Party promise, one of the gunna dos, but there was never a dollar in the budget or an outyear for the jail which was promised. It was promised, as was your gunna promise for the medical school: “We are gunna have a medical school but we won’t fund it.”
Remember Michael Moore and the Liberal government on the medical school. Remember them on the jail. Those promises were never funded. We have, of course, invested significantly—Mr Mulcahy calls it wasting money on a select few—in improving services for the vulnerable, more than doubling expenditure on aged and
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