Page 2752 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 23 June 2009
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and get the brochure; go and get the letter; go and get the brief; go and get the information; and come and tell us, chapter and verse, the detail. My bet is that he will not, because that is the nature of our Chief Minister. And it is a shame.
In the time remaining to me I will address some of the other issues that were raised in the estimates report in relation to this portfolio. As always, there will not be enough time. It is interesting that the Chief Minister continues to misrepresent a number of questions. Just in case you have not read it, Chief Minister, because I know you have a propensity not to read reports, page 9 of volume 1, paragraph 1.39, refers to the number of questions lodged with the committee: 530.
I know we spin and we like to twist and change things, but the truth of the situation here is that there were 530 questions. I will say it again, just in case you missed it. There were 530 questions. It is interesting that, as we were making decisions, only 16 per cent of those questions had been answered; by the following Monday, about 35 per cent had been answered.
But if you were trying to make an informed decision on this budget, on the information provided by this government, you would not be able to because they took so many questions on notice and they were either unable to or unwilling to answer questions. And many of the questions are still not answered today. If you were trying to make an informed decision or if you were trying to come to a position based on knowledge, rather than just “Trust me, I’m Jon Stanhope, I’m the Chief Minister,” then you would be struggling to make an informed decision.
But there it is: 35 per cent of the questions, when this report was finished, were unanswered. So the Chief Minister’s claims of swamping the ACT public service are rubbish. We know they can answer those questions; they are a very professional public service.
We talked about many things in the section relating to the Chief Minister. I would now like to speak particularly about business and economic development. The Chief Minister is responsible, or at least he should be responsible, for the decisions of his government. We know that this Chief Minister eschews responsibility wherever it is not convenient. Nevertheless, it is this Chief Minister, as it is with the premiers of all the states, that should acknowledge his overall responsibility for the ACT.
In this context, I note the proposal for the budgets for the next seven years. It is interesting what a change moving into government can make. We have got a Chief Minister who is now quite happy to have seven years of budgets but, of course, when he was the opposition leader he said:
We keenly appreciate that deficit budgets and high debts are serious impediments to dealing with social priorities.
So, members, for the next seven years, his high debts, his seven years of deficits, will be an impediment to delivering social priorities in this city, by the Chief Minister’s own words. They are the words of the economic guru, the master of fiscal policy, and it is quite clear that when he made that comment on 14 March 2001 it was indeed very hollow.
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