Page 1035 - Week 04 - Thursday, 18 June 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
The Chief Minister has consistently refused to tell the Assembly how she proposes to fund her commitments. She avoids questions about new taxes. She has consistently refused to rule out spending cuts. She has done a backflip on whether or not she will borrow, saying on 7 April that she would continue her practice of not borrowing, then saying in the Assembly as recently as last Tuesday that she would borrow prudently, "if necessary". I find that "if necessary" qualification an odd statement in light of the newly revealed gap of $55m on the capital budget. If she is not going to borrow, how is she going to bridge it?
The Opposition, the business community and the electorate are all thoroughly confused on the issue of where this Government thinks it is going and, quite frankly, I think the Government itself is confused. Here we have a government short on understanding of how to frame its budget. We have a government that is out of its depth and bereft of solutions. I suspect that the Cabinet room is becoming a sweatshop as Ministers realise that their promises do not add up and their budget becomes more and more difficult to frame within the parameters of a $73m gap. Of course, one might ask: Does it stop at $73m? It has already nearly doubled in the last six months.
The Chief Minister appears, however, to have been struck quite belatedly by the gravity of the situation, because in a paper she co-wrote, according to its cover sheet, with the State Premiers to submit to the Special Premiers Conference last month she said, and I quote what they said collectively:
If States are to contain their structural deficit without increasing taxes or charges, massive ongoing cutbacks in essential State services will be required. By 1995-96 State deficits will be equivalent to almost 50 per cent of the States' health budgets.
There was a prophesy from the Chief Minister, along with her State Premier confreres. At the beginning of that statement I said that the Chief Minister was struck by this. Perhaps "thunderstruck" might have been a more apt word.
Ms Follett appears to have been defining over a period of months, on the run and perhaps even subconsciously in some cases, the ground rules for her coming budget. On empirical evidence these are - and they all come from the record - that there will be either a massive blow-out in the deficit by 1995-96 or massive cuts in essential State services. She will not rule out new taxes. She ruled out borrowing and then she ruled it back in again. She said that no government service shall be quarantined from examination in order to achieve efficiencies. She said that the burden of new taxes will be spread across all sectors of the community - I suggest that our business people had better stand back - and she tells us that she will not pre-empt her budget.
These are a quite different set of ground rules from the ones she spoke about just last Tuesday. The strategy objectives described then, in what I consider to be nothing but a series of platitudes, would have us believe that the Follett Government is in control of the budget. Ms Follett's performance, as reflected in her public statements, regrettably does not support that, nor does the blow-out in the health budget, nor does Ms Follett's first public acknowledgment of blow-outs in other undefined areas of the budget. I quote her own budget statement:
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .