Page 2466 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 18 August 1993
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This is typical of newspapers across the length and breadth of this country - and the Chief Minister says, "Let us look at the positive side". The problem is that there is not much of a positive side. The budget was negative, the Government intended it to be negative, and any claim to anything positive about it is spurious and cannot be sustained. What we have is yet another Commonwealth budget which claims to be giving primary emphasis to jobs. The primary objective of this budget, the first couple of paragraphs say, is jobs. Scattered through it, as we have become accustomed to with Labor governments, are references to social justice. It almost sounds as if Mr Dawkins had Rosemary Follett write his speech, because that is exactly the sort of stuff we hear here, and none of it holds up.
The reality is that Mr Dawkins has offered no jobs and he has offered no social justice. If his speech yesterday introducing his budget had made those admissions it would have been an honest one. The Federal budget promises massive job losses, in fact. First of all, it promises them in the public sector, with 15,000-plus in the coming four years to go from the Commonwealth Public Service. This will have a powerful effect in the ACT. We estimate that up to 5,000 of them will go from Canberra. The Chief Minister tries to downplay that, but she does not have any figures to prove it. We have done our homework and we believe that our figures are accurate.
The Federal budget offers no job creation incentives where they are most needed, so far as the ACT is concerned anyway, and that is in the small business sector, which is the predominant business sector in the ACT. Petrol and wholesale tax hikes, amongst others in the Federal budget, will have a negative effect on our small business. There is nothing positive about that. The meagre tax relief for low income taxpayers will disappear rapidly under the petrol and wholesale tax increases, amongst others, and the exclusion of 16-year-olds from Austudy, removal of eye test benefits from Medicare, and reductions in pharmaceutical benefits will impact on low income families especially. This is the socially just budget! The Federal budget does throw a crumb out by way of a new child-care incentive scheme, but it pales into insignificance amongst the other statistics.
Mr Keating's famous language skills simply cannot cope with his own budget. What has happened to phrases such as "going gangbusters" and "aren't they beautiful numbers"? He is absolutely spellbound. The best he can do is say, "This is a decent budget", whatever that means. Mr Dawkins himself ducked for cover, even before he had finished his speech. His speech notes told him to say "achievements of truly historic proportions", but it came out verbally as "achievements to be proud of". So even Mr Dawkins, before he had finished his speech, ran out of a bit of enthusiasm.
If we look at some of the features of the budget, owners of older cars will find nothing decent and nothing socially just about the extra $4 or $5 it will cost them to fill up when they go into the gas station. They will not enjoy having to pay increased wholesale taxes every time they need the car maintained, either. When they cannot cope with the extra costs of keeping old faithful on the road, buying a new car will cost them more as well. A cynic might see some pressure from the car builders behind these moves. Mr Dawkins is forcing people with older cars to make unnecessary massive capital expenditures that he justifies in terms of protecting children of low income families from lead. A cynic might have some fun with that as well.
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