Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – I thank the member for Clark for bringing on this matter of public importance on budget cuts. I want to start, as have other members, with the notion of getting a grip. ‘Get a grip’, as the minister said. If nurses are having to get a grip now, I wonder what they are going to have to do after September to cope with things.
I want to put on the record here today that I am incredibly disturbed at what looks like an increasing level of anti-worker, and indeed, anti-union, rhetoric that is coming from the minister. We heard in Question Time today repeated criticisms of the aspirations and the advocacy of the unions in the health space, nurses having to come to terms and get a grip with the situation. This is not acceptable language for the minister to be raising in this context. We are in incredibly tight times. The Budget will be tight and there are people across the public sector and across the community who are genuinely fearful for what this coming Budget is going to reveal.
We have seen elements of it already – the vacancy controls, the pat downs, the incredible waitlists in the health sector. The community reaction to this has been quite significant. The community is outraged and concerned, and well might they be. We are an ageing population, we are an unhealthy population, and we need to have improvements in our health space. Plans to improve, to quote the minister, include a ‘recruit recruitment blitz’, and quoting from ads in The Age. These are not evidence of an increase in budget, minister. This is not evidence that the budget will not be cut. You cannot employ more people on one hand and reduce the budget on the other, and it is clear that in the health space people are advocating for more money so they can do more services for the Tasmanian people.
While the conversation has been dominated by Health, it is clear that it is across the scope of the services the government delivers. The community expects that we are going to get cuts, complications, and compromises made.
When it comes to housing, Homes Tasmania is predominantly debt-funded these days. When we have applications for over 4700 people on the waitlist and wait times of 90 weeks, it is completely unacceptable, as it is unacceptable for the government to be fudging figures when it comes to homes they are building. To be counting vacant land and crisis housing in those figures is an absolute abrogation of responsibility.
We are going to see similar pressures come in the health system and in out-of-home care in the north-west. We have a number of incredibly important childcare positions that are unfilled. The Integrity Commission has taken the unprecedented step of putting on the public record their inability to deliver on the requirements and recommendations outlined in the Weiss review. Additionally, the community services sector, which delivers services for needy people, is crying out for an increase in funding and indexation for project funding.
What has been utterly absent in today’s debate on both sides of the Chamber is the elephant in the room, which is the notion of spending over a billion dollars on a stadium that Tasmanians neither need nor want at Macquarie Point. No-one believes this stadium can be delivered for $715 million, apart from perhaps the people on my left. I do not think the Premier believes this either because at the start of the election campaign his commitment to cap expenditure at $375 million is effectively an admission that it will blow out significantly. No-one who I have talked to understands who in the private sector will fund a billion-dollar stadium that is going to lose $320 million over 20 years. It simply does not stack up. To put this into context, recent contracts for the architects have been issued for $37.9 million – $37.9 million to do the drawing for this billion-dollar stadium; add to this the paid-out contracts for the development that will not go ahead and the dollars allocated for the previous masterplan.
Meanwhile, other infrastructure, such as Wharf 6 for the Nuyina at Macquarie Point, remains completely unfunded. It looks like TasNetworks is expected to debt-fund that asset.
Time expired.
