Page 1465 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2016
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
was called to order by you not once but twice for saying things that he knew he would be called to order on. But he does that anyway, because that is how the Chief Minister operates.
We have had these debates a number of times. When cuts occur, if they are cuts from the Liberal Party then they are dreadful, it is slash and burn and it is anti-Canberra. But if they are cuts from the Labor Party, that is good economic management. Mr Barr characterised closing 23 schools as “difficult reform”. Goodness me! Go and talk to the communities that you have shut down. Go and ask why it is that in Weston you are now having to put in extra capacity, for instance in Duffy, because you shut the school at Weston Creek.
Of course, the cultural institutions were raised. I think I am the only person in this place who has worked in one of those cultural institutions. In fact, I have worked in two. I set up the shop at Questacon and I then set up the retail arm at the National Library. As we on this side have always said, cuts to the cultural institutions are appalling. But when the Rudd government cut, and particularly savagely cut, funding to the National Gallery of Australia, who was the chief cheerleader for the cuts? Why, it was Andrew Barr. There was a remarkable interview on the ABC the day after that budget when they asked then Senator Lundy whether she could support those cuts in the way that Andrew Barr had supported those cuts, and she said that, no, she could not.
The chief cheerleader for cuts to a cultural institution under his federal colleagues said that it was okay. In fact, he actually said it was good for Canberra because it meant, in terms of the National Gallery, that their travelling exhibition program would cease. Mr Barr said, “That’s good because that means they will have to come to Canberra to see those exhibitions.” That was the logic. That is the twisted logic of this man. He can make all of the snide comments that he wants, but at the end of the day he said that the Rudd cuts were in fact fiscal consolidation. “I have just been sacked; I have been fiscally consolidated by Mr Rudd”!
We know the numbers, because it was revealed in estimates that the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd cuts would culminate in the loss of 14,473 jobs from the Australian public service across Australia. Of course, the bulk of those were in the ACT. The Canberra Liberals stood up regarding those job cuts, but the Australian Labor Party ACT branch, the ACT government, did not. There was not a word from those opposite regarding what their own colleagues did. They are sitting over there shamefaced, looking at their computers, texting and doing all the things you do to avoid the truth. The truth is that the only party that has stood up to federal governments consistently, be they Liberal or Labor, is the Canberra Liberals—whether it was Kate Carnell taking on John Howard or whether it was the Canberra Liberals in recent times under Zed Seselja and Jeremy Hanson taking on Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott and saying that the cuts were unwarranted and unnecessary.
We are the consistent ones in this argument. We are the ones who have consistently said that we cannot rely forever on the federal government. Yet when you look at the budget papers for Mr Barr’s budget a couple of years back, they said everything would be hunky-dory when commonwealth spending returned to normal levels. That
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video