Page 3049 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 11 September 1990
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Mr Speaker, I will turn now to the 1990-91 budget and cover some of the principal features. The 1990-91 recurrent budget is balanced. Total recurrent expenditure and available funds are both estimated to be $1,106m, with $604m being Commonwealth grants and $502m coming from our own revenue sources. Funds allocated from the budget for capital purposes are expected to be $262m, financed by $74m of Commonwealth grants and $138m of our own funds. New borrowings will be lower than last year at $44m.
A balanced budget is a major achievement, given the magnitude of the task that confronted us when presented with the forward estimates. This task was made even more difficult by the Commonwealth's decision not to honour fully its real terms guarantee. The ACT general revenue grant is down by 3.1 per cent in real terms, compared to last year. The difference of $12.4m has been placed in the Commonwealth's ACT Transitional Funding Trust Account. Once again, the ACT has been put in the position of having to justify to the Commonwealth its genuine needs for restructuring funds from this account.
I refer now to the Community Development Fund. A persisting anomaly in ACT financial arrangements since self-government has been the continuation of the Community Development Fund. Sources of revenue for the fund have included lottery receipts, soccer pools and gaming machine levies. The CDF mechanism was set up some years ago under Commonwealth Government arrangements, to ensure that these revenues would be available for the ACT community. They would have been subsumed otherwise in the Commonwealth's Consolidated Revenue Fund, and they would have been subject to Commonwealth Government priorities. Now that the ACT has its own Consolidated Revenue Fund, that arrangement is no longer appropriate; nor is it necessary. Accordingly, the Government has decided that the fund will be closed from 1 January 1991, with grants from that date being paid from the Consolidated Revenue Fund.
Mr Berry: Shame! You are going to cut back. You are going to cut back funding to community organisations.
MR KAINE: As somebody who raped it of $21m last year, you should say, "Shame". The Government is well aware that community groups may be concerned by this move. However, the Government guarantees that total community grants will be maintained in real terms for two years so that no category of users assisted by the fund will be disadvantaged. Did you hear that, Mr Berry?
Mr Berry: I will believe it when I see it.
MR KAINE: As I said, as somebody who raped the fund of $21m last year, you should say, "Shame". The distribution of the grants will be reviewed in accordance with normal practice by the end of 1990 to ensure that the allocation of funds is consistent with Government priorities.
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