Page 1646 - Week 08 - Thursday, 28 September 1989
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Does the Treasurer believe that Labor's traditional budgetary strategy of increasing revenues rather than reducing expenditures, even when the capacity to pay does not exist, will produce the required result? This approach, in view of the magnitude of the problem, would be absurd and the effects on individuals and businesses in the ACT would be devastating. What is required is the imposition of local priorities and the ACT community's needs upon the bureaucracy's forward estimates - something that the Government has failed abysmally to do.
I would like to refer to the budget consultative committee and the proposed Estimates Committee of this Assembly. The Treasurer claims to have produced a budget as a result of an open and consultative budget process. It is in fact little more than a representation generally of inherited forward estimates and the community has recognised the community consultation ploy for what it is, a confidence trick.
Even the Deputy Chief Minister's own creation, the ministerial advisory committee on schooling, repudiated the process as recently as this morning. The Government has congratulated itself on its new policy items to the value of $5.3m in the budget - $5.3m out of a total budget of $1.2 billion. Put into perspective, this represents something less than one half of one per cent of the total budget. The Government has also claimed that great sacrifices were made to achieve expenditure reduction, that the bulk of these reductions consisted of $13.4m for "lower national wage case provision in view of revised estimates from the Industrial Relations Branch".
Other expenditure sacrifices include $3.7m for variation in price parameters applicable to the public sector and $6.3m for other base refinements. These hard decisions, Mr Speaker, must have taken great courage by the Treasurer, I am sure, but in fact they represent nothing more than creative adjustments to the forward estimates budget base.
The budget consultative committee was ostensibly established by the Treasurer as part of the Government's "open and consultative strategy". However, it really represents a poor attempt by the Treasurer to legitimise her budget by claiming to have consulted widely with the community. The Government appears obsessed with the idea that it can present a budget and defend it, no matter how bad it may be, based on the spurious justification of open and consultative processes. After the public relations exercise for public consultation was concluded, the Government reinstated about $2.5m to placate the disenchanted; a very small adjustment indeed and one which the teachers and nurses will find totally inadequate.
The Treasurer has now proposed a further process in legitimising her budget by referring it to an Estimates Committee which, on her program, will examine the expenditure proposals in mid-October so that debate on the
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