Page 1807 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 May 1990
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My final point is to do with the budget realities that the ACT presently faces. I said before that the Opposition was presenting us with a typical "all care, no responsibility" set of advice on how the ACT was going to find its way out of its problems. But, if one looks carefully at what the Labor Party has been giving to the ACT in the way of advice over the last few weeks, one really finds that our room to manoeuvre is extremely small.
First of all, we have the Federal Minister for Finance advising us that there is overspending of the order of $100m. Now, apparently, members of the Australian Labor Party are telling us to ignore that advice.
Mr Wood: Will you table the advice he has given you?
MR HUMPHRIES: It is in Hansard. Mr Speaker, apparently members opposite do not want to believe their own former Federal Labor Minister for Finance. I think he is no longer in that position, more because of his truthfulness than anything else.
Mr Wood: I would like to see that documentation.
MR HUMPHRIES: You might not have documentation for a while, Mr Wood. The question is not so much whether we have documentation; the question is what the Federal Government intends to do on the assumptions that it makes about how much the ACT is overfunded. That is the issue. The former Federal Finance Minister claims that we are $100m overfunded. That may or may not be the right figure but it is certainly the one that the Federal Government is working to at present. I am alerted to the fact that the present Minister for Territories, David Simmons, has not done anything at all to cause us to rethink our position in that regard and he indicated very recently - on 20 April this year - that we should be very careful about making assumptions that things are not as bad as they might seem. He suggested that, if we made such assumptions, we were in for a big shock because that is not the reality. He talked about not being able to put things off and the fact that in tough economic times people expected governments to make tough decisions. That is a pretty clear signal, Mr Speaker.
So we have Senator Walsh's advice that we are $100m short. Then we have Mr Hawke's advice to the Chief Minister that no extensions will be granted in the period of transition for the ACT. We have a big problem to face and we are not going to have any extra time to face it. What do we do about the problem? This morning Senator McMullan advised us that increasing taxes and charges is reprehensible. That is not quite the same thing as Ms Follett said. She is on the record as saying that the Government ought to be increasing taxes and charges.
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