Page 1819 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 15 June 1993
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If you go to the Hansard where we debated this, you will discover that I challenged the Government to tell me what it was. Five months' worth of what? Was it five months' worth on the basis of last month's expenditure or five months' worth of the expected expenditure in this current fiscal year? No matter how you did the sums, you could not come up with it being five-twelfths of anything.
This year the Chief Minister has got smart. Although the speech is almost verbatim from the one she used last year, the five months bit is left out. Now we do not even know, according to the Chief Minister, that it is supposed to be approximately five months' worth of expenditure. Let us do the same sort of analysis that I did last year. Just what does it represent? If you have a look at the Government's own forward estimate for this year, and I quote from last year's budget overview statement, their budget estimate for this year is $1,216m, in round figures. That includes around $12m provision carried forward, so the net appropriation for this fiscal year we are about to go into is somewhere around $1,205m, according to their own forward estimates. That was before the Commonwealth was going to chop $80m off and we got a few other little problems.
Ever since the year 1990, when I as Chief Minister and Treasurer introduced the concept of making a budget statement at about this time of the year, the Chief Minister has followed the fashion. This year she does not. What is her budget strategy this year? We do not know. The Government is sitting in their bunker up on the fifth floor in an absolute blue funk because they do not know how to bring in a budget that is going to be balanced, and even this close - in June, two months away from the time the budget is going to be on the table - they cannot or will not tell us how they propose to close this budget gap. Again, obfuscate the issue, do not tell anybody anything, keep it all under the table, and with a bit of luck it will all work out all right.
This year the amount sought in the Supply Bill is $643m. Compare that with the $1,205m that the forward estimates tell us we can expect. We know that it will be a bit more than that because that does not include new policy initiatives, although whether they are going to have any money to afford any new policy initiatives this year remains to be seen. The $643m is well over half the estimated budget - not five-twelfths, not five months' worth, but well over half of any budget we can expect this Government to bring down this year. If it is supposed to cover just the expenditure until the Appropriation Bill is passed in November, why is it more than half the maximum expected budget that we can see the Government bringing down this year? Does the Government explain it? Not on your nellie, they do not. There is absolutely no explanation at all. We are supposed to take the Government on faith: "We need $643m, but just give us the money and we will take care of it. We do not need to tell you what we want it for".
If you compare that with previous years, in 1991-92, when the budget was $1,275m, the Supply Bill was only $581m approximately. In the next year, 1992-93, the budget increased by $20m; it went up to $1,295m. But the Supply Bill went up by $40m. It went up to $619m approximately. This year, with the budget expected to drop considerably - and let us use the round figure of $1,220m; it will be somewhere about that - what does the Supply Bill do? It goes up by another $23m. So the budget is going down, but the Supply Bill is going up. Why?
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