Page 2453 - Week 09 - Thursday, 17 September 1992
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that supposedly are being created by this budget. We have a 2 per cent cut in government department expenditure, a 2 per cent cut in each department's operations. That will manifest itself, unquestionably, in some job losses, and any Minister who says "No", frankly, is not giving us the full picture.
Mr Kaine: Living in cloud-cuckoo-land.
MR HUMPHRIES: Living in cloud-cuckoo-land. I have been there. I know that if you say to the public servants, "Give me 2 per cent; how you do it is up to you", you will get job losses, because it is easier to do that and it creates, in some ways, more frustration for the Government than doing things which might otherwise be the case if the Government had a plan for making that 2 per cent reduction. Believe me, Madam Speaker, there will be job losses. Of course, the Government has not issued any figures in these budget papers to say just how many there will be, as it attempted to do last year, and I can understand why - because, Madam Speaker, with each job that is lost through that process of budget reduction we are losing the benefit of the 500 jobs supposedly created in this budget.
How many are going to be lost? We do not know. If we lose, say, 300 jobs through a budget reduction of 2 per cent, and that is not unrealistic by any means, we will have a net gain of only 200 jobs out of this budget - a $1.2 billion budget producing just 200 new jobs in the ACT. That is not a very impressive figure at all. Of course, if the ACT Government achieves the level of job reduction it aimed for last year, which was, on some accounts anyway, pretty unclear - over 500 jobs - then the net result of this 1992-93 budget would be not a bean, not one single net job created in the ACT. Madam Speaker, to talk with a smiling face into the cameras and say, "This is a jobs budget" seems to me to betray enormous lack of regard for the people out there who are going to be hurt by this cruel deception. Where are the jobs? They are not anywhere.
Ms Szuty has quoted approvingly the number of give-aways in this budget, and I will go on to refer to some of those myself. I must say that some of those give-aways are very nice and I think that they are great - particularly in the area of health, I say with great approval. Some of those things needed to be done some time ago and it is great to see that they are finally there. But I have to say that we cannot talk in glowing terms about the things the budget does in terms of new expenditure initiatives without pointing out that the other side of that very same coin is the fact that there is going to be a 2 per cent reduction in the Government's overall outlay in each individual department as well as a 0.5 per cent increase in training levies, which effectively brings it very close to 2.5 per cent in overall reductions.
That means that what the Government gives with one hand it will take away with the other. What manifests itself as a nice new initiative in one area will have to be paid for, in effect, within that department, to some extent, by the other offsetting cuts which are going on elsewhere, and, as I have said before, given that new programs are in some cases starting up and new initiatives are being created, there will almost certainly have to be job reductions elsewhere.
I referred to new initiatives and I will mention them briefly so as to give a sense of balance to this comment on the budget. There are important initiatives dealing with the Aboriginal Advisory Council. I must say that that is a welcome development. It accords with the initiative of next year's International Year for the World's Indigenous People, and it also dovetails with the initiatives flowing
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