Parliamentary record : Part I debates (11 November 1986)
Debates for 4th Assembly 1983 - 1987; ParliamentNT; Parliamentary Record; 4th Assembly 1983 - 1987
1986-11-11
Made available by the Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory
English
Debates
Northern Territory Legislative Assembly
Darwin
application/pdf
Attribution International 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)
Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
https://hdl.handle.net/10070/220605
https://hdl.handle.net/10070/698931
DEBATES - Tuesday 11 November 1986 received substantial funding to upgrade it to a secondary college. This move is proving a tremendous success in spite of the dissent and misinformation created by the Teachers Federation President, Bob Wharton, whom members will recall walked out of the working party meeting last year and subsequently resigned. Today, we find that his members, the teachers at that particular secondary college, feel very comfortable about the change. In fact, most of them want to stay right there. There has been almost no turnover of teachers in the last 12 months at the Casuarina Secondary College and yet, 12 months ago, because of Mr Wharton and his activities, they were all fired up. It is part of the exciting new development. Let me inform members of some of the work that has been allowed for at Casuarina Secondary College in this budget: upgrading special ist facilities - $429 752; extensions and modifications to convert -to,-secondary colleges - and this is split with the Darwin High School - $358 491; construction of an automotive workshop - $110 000; provision of science teaching and staff facilities - $500 000; library extensions $750 000; and the provision of new transportable classrooms - $130 000. Let us have a look at some other activities that have been undertaken in or adjacent to my electorate. There is an item under 'Works in Progress' for the Marrara Sporting Complex - $1 598 848. The McMillans Road dupl ication from Bagot Road to Lee Point Road has been allocated $2 474 700. For the Darwin Rapid Creek pedestrian bridge, there is an allocation of $443 382. For the installations of a master control system to synchronise the traffic lights at McMillans Road, there is an allocation of $59 054. There have been a number of other initiatives which I applaud: $12m to the Northern Territory University College; the Police Training Centre received $3.4m; the fire station on Trower Road - $4.1m; and Katherine East High School - $13.5m. And so it goes on. It is a productive and growth-stimulating budget. However, the bottom line is that, until we gain control of our destiny, we will have to continue to accept whatever these people in Canberra want to dish out to us. This confirms to me that we must choose statehood as soon as possible because, until we do so, we will have no control over our own resources. We must gain that control because it is absolutely essential to the financial stability of the Northern Territory. I refer in particular to the control of uranium mining, of national parks and all lands, including Aboriginal lands. These are the keys to the door of our financial future and this government will not rest until it has achieved that goal. I commend the bill. Mr COULTER (Treasurer): Mr Speaker, I thank honourable members for their contributions. I ask the honourable member for Stuart if he would be so kind as to convey to the other members of F Troop, better known as the Northern Territory Branch of the Australian Labor Party or the 6-pack, that they might care to submit questions that they want answered in the interests of having constructive debate in the committee stage rather than ad hoc political pOint-scoring. It would be useful if questions could be made available to ministers during the course of tomorrow so that reasonable debate can occur on Thursday during the committee stage. Since the member for Stuart is the sole representative of the opposition here this evening, I ask him to convey that message to his colleagues. The opposition's economic spokesman said that it was with considerable anger and disappointment that he rose to respond to the Treasurer's first budget. We all know that hell has no fury like the opposition economic spokesman's scorn. He ran out of things to say in about the first 5 minutes. 871