Page 1225 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 24 March 2009
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a site office, $1,000 per tree guard. Then they start: what about students with a disability? Why have they missed out?
Mrs Dunne: Good question.
MS GALLAGHER: Mrs Dunne, I would challenge you then to go back and have a look at budgets where we invested more than any other government in special education. We are not talking $100,000 here, which is how you link the two. The $1,000 tree guards you then link to special education. Special education services do not cost $100,000; they cost millions of dollars. In two budgets that I distinctly remember, we increased the special education budget by $4 million. There is no mention of that, is there, in balancing out the opposition’s attack.
There is this crazy scenario that Bimberi costs $1 million per bed. To run that argument, you would have to say that, over the life of that building, only 40 children will live in that, which is a ludicrous argument to run. It is a 40-bed facility and it cost $40 million; therefore the opposition have got their calculator out and it obviously costs $1 million per bed. How ridiculous, and you know it! So you stop counting once the 40 children have been through it, which they already would have been.
We then go to staff training in JACS, $20,000 and $40,000. We can all get petty here and nitpick and go though individual agency lines. We can do the same thing with you guys. We can have a look at all that wonderful media training that a group of you went on a couple of years ago and we can add that up. Maybe that was a waste. Obviously it was. You did not win the election and your media performance certainly did not help. Come on! Let us go through it line by line. You can pick out a little project and make fun of it.
Then we have got Mr Smyth going on about stationery. Certainly in my office—and Mr Hanson will probably come in at No 2—the FOIs that you would receive would be a large contributor to stationery costs in the ACT public service. We are more than happy to stop photocopying for that. That would be a sizeable saving. I can see it now in the budget: FOI savings from the ACT opposition. They are going to stop putting in their monthly requests that give them hundreds of pages of paper which no doubt they turf in the bin after they have put out their standard media release.
Let us go to the issue of the savings that we in this government have implemented and let us go back to the functional review. You guys opposed every single one of them. Every single one of those savings measures that we introduced in the budget off the back of a review of government services, you objected to—$100 million worth of savings built into agency budgets. I know this, because I manage two departments that have savings built into their budget. Where were you then championing the savings measures that this government introduced? There were bigger savings measures than finding a few reams of paper—$100 million factored into the forward estimates—which are still delivering. The opposition at the time objected to all of them.
Then the question, interesting in its omission from Mrs Dunne’s speech, was: what has the government done with it? We have doubled health expenditure. That seems like a pretty good place to put a fair bit of money—more than $44 million a year, which is the GST boom that we have been receiving.
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