27189
PRIMES MAINISTE PRESS STATEMENT
19 November 1974
The Prime Minister, Mr Whitlam, released the following
statement when he left Amberley late last night to return to
Canberra.. He had spent four days of intensive campaigning
for the Queensland State election.
The Bjelke-Petersen Government is cheating Queenslanders
of the benefits of increased Australian Government funds for
education, housing and local government. It is cutting back
its own expenditures in areas where the Australian Government
has given more money.
Not only has the Bjelke-Petersen Government deprived
Queenslanders of $ 50 million in Federal funds by refusing
to co-operate on growth centres and land commissions. It
has effectively deprived Queensland of millions of dollars
worth of extra money for essential community services.
The Queensland Government has shown itself mean and
devious in its financial allocations. The more my Government
is prepared to spend on essential social purposes, the less
Mr Bjelke-Petersen is willing to spend.
The Queensland Government accepted a $ 16,500,000
supplement for education under the Karmel recommendations last
year and then reduced its own expenditure accordingly. This
year, despite a 16.3% increase in Queensland consolidated
revenue, there is an increase of less than half that percentage
in proposed education expenditures. This is happening while
Queensland children are taught in corridors and on verandahs
because of a shortage of classrooms.
This year we approved massive direct grants to local
government totalling $ 56 million throughout Australia, including
just under $ 9 million for Queensland. These grants will enable
local councils to improve essential community services
roads, health centres, recreation facilities.
Yet the Queensland Government has been progressively
reducing the percentage of local authority expenditure which it
provides in subsidies from State revenue. At the same time
the percentage of State Government spending met by money from
the Australian Government has progressively risen.
Since 1956 the percentage of local authority expenditure
met by the State has fallen from 6.23% to 4.94% and the
percentage of State Government spending met by the Commonwealth
has risen from 33.61% to 45.09%.
-2-
State subsidies on roads were reduced from 20% to
and subsidies on sports field and playground construction
have been cut from 20% to nothing.
While the Queensland Government refuses millions of
dollars from the Australian Government for land acquisition and
development it is planning to cut its own expenditure on land
development by 11%.
Despite greatly increased Federal grants for housing
under my Government, Queensland is actually building fewer
housing commission homes than Labor when it was last in office
in 1957. Despite all the advantages of economic development and
despite financial assistance from Canberra, the State
Government built last year only 1400 homes 500 fewer than
Labor's last total and yet at the same time left unspent
no less than $ 12 million provided in housing funds by the
Australian Government.
The most miserable cut back of all was Mr Bjelke-Petersen' s
decision to scrap the $ 2,350,000 he had budgeted for State
unemployment relief.
When my Government raised unemployment benefits
Mr Bjelke-Petersen responded by abolishing his benefits
altogether. He took it out on men and women who had lost
their jobs. He . took it out on their families.
Who can doubt Percy Tucker's claim that the Queensland
Government has a vested interest in unemployment so it can
attack the Australian Government and pass the buck to Canberra
for all its failures?
The Prime Minister said that the very worst, the most
cynical of all Mr Bjelke-Petersen's dispicable actions was
his deliberate downgrading of the double orphan benefit.
Queensland once gave a $ 12 benefit to orphans. When Labor
came to power in Canberra we initiated a Federal orphan
benefit of $ 10. The combined State and Federal total would
have given orphans a total benefit of $ 22. And that would
have been the least compensation we could given children who
had lost both parents.
But what did the Queensland Premier do?
He immediately reduced the State orphan benefit by a
total of $ 10. He wiped out the effect of the Federal grant.
He reduced the State orphan benefit to a miserly $ 2.
Instead of Orphans getting $ 22, Mr Bjelke-Petersen ensured
that they continued to get only $ 12. Since that despicable,
that heartless act of the Queensland Premier, the Australian
Government has once more increased the orphan benefit by
another $ 5 to
I can only hope that the Queensland Premier's peculiar
sense of non-co-operative miserliness does not prompt him to
repeat his earlier shameful discrimination against Queensland's
orphans.