Page 2191 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 August 2007
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MR BARR: In looking at the sport and recreation budget and the changes that we made through the incorporation of sport and recreation into the Department of Territory and Municipal Services, the aligning of sportsgrounds facilities and the people who were responsible for the management of sports facilities who were sitting in urban services, together with the sport and recreation people who were sitting in the former Department of Economic Development, aligning those people together in one unit within the Department of Territory and Municipal Services resulted in some significant financial savings.
As part of an overall approach to streamlining administration of service delivery in the ACT we brought those two units together. That resulted in significant savings to the budget. There is no doubting that; it was called sensible administration. For those opposite—
Mrs Burke: Cutting funding to sport.
MR BARR: The thing that really gets me is that Mr Mulcahy gets up here and gives hand-on-heart speeches through the appropriation debate about the need for expenditure restraint, to get your back office right, to ensure that you are doing all that you can to push services to the front line, and to get your administration right. We undertake those reforms. We undertake them, yet those opposite, the little gang of shadow ministers who have no idea about budget management and about how to put together an efficient structure, run the completely opposite line.
So the Liberal Party of 2007, under leader Stefaniak, is to have Mulcahy down one side of the street—he is Mr Fiscal Responsibility—and then on the other side of the street you have the little gang of shadow ministers who spend, spend, spend, or who oppose every specific effort the government makes to reduce expenditure, to bring it into line with national averages, and to ensure that the money that we spend, that the money that we allocate in sport and recreation, in education and in health all have come in to address the particular issue that Mrs Burke has raised around obesity in our kids.
About 25 per cent of primary school kids are obese. We are bringing together resources across three portfolios to address this. I will have further announcements to make in the near future, so watch this space, members. But it is important that we do that in an efficient manner. The opposition continues to run this line that somehow those areas are immune from any effective scrutiny of the expenditure in those areas, that we should not look at that, that we should not look at streamlining administration, and that we should not look at consolidating services that were spread across a number of government departments.
That is another preposterous suggestion from a bunch of people who cannot even have a consistent line of argument on budget matters. It is an absolutely ridiculous proposition. In a moment I am sure we will be treated to Mr Mulcahy giving us another one of these examples in fiscal rectitude. I am sure that will be the case in the near future. But when he is doing that he should be reminded of the little echoes that are coming from the shadow ministers. I have said in this place that it would be a tough job; it would be a very tough job—
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