Page 1605 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 June 2007
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The $10.5 million boost in funding for elective surgery, the $12.6 million for acute beds at the Canberra Hospital, the $8.5 million to enhance critical care capacity and the $2.15 million to combat chronic disease are certainly significant injections of funding. But the question is: has it all been allocated to fill critical gaps in the health service? One has only to look at the announcement of $1.7 million in funding to provide dental services to 400 adults. Why has the government allowed this figure to climb to such an unacceptable level?
I add in closing that it is significant that $12.6 million is being provided for mental health services in the ACT. That is most welcome, but clearly it is going to take a few more years for all the services that the government has talked about to come on line. A lot of these things are in the outyears and we will be watching them. I would say that Canberrans have a right to believe that, when they fall ill, they will have access to some of the best health care services in the country.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo) (4.58): This week the Chief Minister presented the ACT with part three of a four-part play. Last year was act 2. It consisted of a terrifying slash and burn budget, a violent act perpetrated against the community of the ACT. The opposition will acknowledge that, on the back of a fast-spending but slow-thinking Labor government, act 2 was inevitable. It precedes act 3, as Labor attempts to consolidate and prepare for an election run. This budget is a nothing budget that makes only one thing very clear: the campaign has started.
This is a predictable strategy. It is predictable and easily identified not just by the Assembly but by the people of the ACT. Canberrans will see this budget for what it is: the next step in an election campaign. The Canberra community are more intelligent than the Chief Minister realises. They will not forget and they no longer trust. They cannot afford to trust. They used to trust the government; they no longer do.
Canberrans wanted to trust Stanhope Labor when Labor said they would not close any schools. They wanted to trust Stanhope Labor when they said they would improve housing affordability with the Land Development Agency. They wanted to trust Stanhope Labor after the bushfires, when we were told, “If you want to blame someone, blame me.” But things do not always work out that way. The credibility is gone and the trust is no longer there. Try as they may, it will never be the same again.
The Canberra community is intelligent and has a long memory. Perhaps it is only now that Canberrans realise the significance of Ted Quinlan leaving when he did. Despite that, it is a very good time to be Treasurer. Riding on the back of the largest federal government surplus sits the ACT Treasurer, with millions upon millions flowing through from the GST and unemployment at an all-time low, thanks to an ever expanding federal public service.
It was the Chief Minister himself who once said that a Liberal budget surplus was “a surplus not even the government knew it was falling into”. The irony of this, of course, is the Chief Minister’s somewhat militant attitude towards the GST, which is propping up his bottom line. The Chief Minister has called the GST “an inherently unfair tax, a tax that will increase costs, an inequitable tax”; “a tax with inflationary pressures and implications for interest rates”; “a tax that imposes severe compliance costs on small
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