Page 2178 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 2 August 2022
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like his usual lines about COVID and low interest rates, the fact of the matter remains he has been steadily and consciously vandalising the ACT’s budget for over a decade. The ACT went into the COVID pandemic in the worst financial position of any state or territory in this country and, like many of the current failures across a number of portfolios, COVID has exacerbated the problems that were there long before the pandemic.
My motion today is very simple and calls on the Labor-Greens government to commission an independent budget audit to investigate and report on the territory’s finances by the end of the 2022 calendar year. It is especially prudent now to undertake this comprehensive audit as we enter this new COVID recovery phase for our economy and as our community faces incredible challenges with the increasing cost of living. This independent audit would not only examine the long-term sustainability of the territory’s finances but also look at the territory’s debt position and long-term deficits and their underlying causes. It would present recommendations to improve the territory’s financial position, suggest alternative fiscal strategies and provide a long-term plan for budget repair, for an eventual return to surplus.
A further and crucial purpose of this independent budget audit is to provide much-needed transparency to this Labor-Greens government’s budgets. We know that the government is big on spin, big on announcements; it knows how to talk the talk. But when you look into the detail, when you look at the deliverables, it is a cold, stark reality of failure after failure after failure. This is a government that has a blatant disregard for the public and it tries, each year, to pull the wool over the eyes of Canberrans in its presentation of the budget. This government regularly changes output classes, line items and reporting periods. It re-scopes and re-profiles projects that are not meeting the performance indicators. Any layman’s review of the budget becomes an apples to oranges comparison.
My motion is self-explanatory, and if the Treasurer is the prudent economic manager that he thinks and touts that he is, he should have no problems supporting it. It was disappointing to hear his comments to the media yesterday, with a tirade of irrelevant and hyperbolic personal attacks on me to deflect from the root of the problem here—which is of course that maybe he is not quite the prudent economic manager that he wants everyone to believe he is, because the numbers do not lie.
What do we have to show for our record net debt of over $5 billion? We have seen real cuts to health funding, and nurses and doctors at breaking point crying out for more staff on the front line. We have new schools which are not keeping up with population growth and our existing schools that are being shut down due to horrific levels of violence and bullying, a teacher shortage, poorly maintained classrooms and hazardous materials. We have some of our most vulnerable in public housing that has been neglected for years. We have the lowest police numbers per capita across the country. We have footpaths and potholes not being fixed, mowing not being done and even rubbish not going to be collected weekly. For the record debt of over $5 billion, what do we have to show for it?
This Treasurer inherited a surplus, a surplus that was gifted to him by his predecessors, and he has gone and put the ACT’s finances into the worst position since
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