Page 481 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 June 1989
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our population grew, real expenditure or services had to fall. The faster our population grew, the faster the fall. This was bad enough, but much worse was to come. The 1988 commitment of the Commonwealth was capable of a narrow and a wide definition. The narrow definition saw the real terms guarantee applying only to the general purpose recurrent assistance. This is what the Commonwealth would be expected to argue for.
In budget paper No. 7 a figure of $418.9m is quoted. However, there is in the ACT budget a range of other Commonwealth payments to which the financial guarantee could be argued to apply. These are specific purpose payments of $153.6m; additions to the general revenue assistance grant for debt servicing on Territorial assets of $41.9m; employer responsibility for superannuation of $45.8m; recognition of the $31.7m surplus generated in the ACT in 1987-88; payments to the ACT Administration for services provided to the Commonwealth of $26.1m; and an additional establishment cost to be added to the 1988-89 level of Commonwealth assistance to the ACT Administration as a result of the introduction of self-government.
In total these recurrent Commonwealth payments to the Territory come to well over $300m. When we take into account payments of a capital nature, the sum of total Commonwealth payments reaches close to $430m over and above the general purpose recurrent assistance which the Commonwealth has used as a base for the calculation of the real increase to which the ACT is entitled. In other words, if we had fought for a wide interpretation of the real terms guarantee, the Commonwealth should have paid the ACT an inflation amount of some $50m, which is 5.9 per cent of the full Commonwealth payments to the ACT. In fact, out of the Premiers Conference we got a mere 2.2 per cent increase, or $10.6m, with the rest - 3.7 per cent or some $22.7m - locked up in a trust account, this amount to be used only with the Commonwealth's agreement on projects which will reduce the recurrent expenditure of the Territory and therefore the amount the Commonwealth must maintain in real terms.
What this means to the people of the ACT is that their services from local government must decline even faster, and on a per capita basis must decline sharply. We estimate that the financial contribution of the Commonwealth measured on a per capita basis will have declined by the end of 1989-90 by nearly 10 per cent, this being the population growth since the base year plus the sum withdrawn from recurrent spending at the Premiers Conference.
The simple fact is that the financial agreement offered by Mr Uren, back in 1984, was the only one that came within a bull's roar of that obtained by the only other new government - that is, the Northern Territory Government - formed this century in Australia. Each step since 1984 has been downhill, and the ultimate result agreed to at the
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