Page 2467 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 18 August 1993
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The 15,000 public servants Mr Dawkins intends to sack will not see much that is decent in this budget either. As well as destroying their livelihoods, Mr Dawkins is going to put the bite on their accumulated recreation leave and furlough benefits. Then he is going to toss them out, with costs up and their expected retirement sources eroded, among the rest of the unemployed. Our unemployment is going to go from 12,000 to 17,000 in the ACT. I am sure that the Chief Minister finds that amusing. What is decent about it? I do not find anything decent in it at all. In fact, it is obscene.
Mr Dawkins cannot quantify the net effects of his budget. Using his own words, he finds it impossible to be too precise about whether reduced income tax will offset higher indirect taxes. What a splendid sense of managerial achievement this is! It would make you laugh if you were not crying already. Mr Dawkins could criticise John Hewson's GST tax cut formula with exquisite precision, but when the boot is on his foot, feeding his formula into the same computer model, cranking the handle and getting the same kind of precision seems to be beyond him. If he could cost John Hewson's package so accurately, why cannot he cost his own? The answer is that he knows that he would not like the answer and he does not want to tell us. Obviously, if he did do that, the taxpayers would see him for the political, fiscal, and every other kind of incompetent that he is.
Rosemary's big brothers on the hill have handed her locally thousands of constituents about to lose their jobs, no stimulus to the generation of jobs in the private sector, certainly not in the small business area, and consumers burdened not only directly by Mr Dawkins's new imposts but also by their flow-on effects. If you do not think there is going to be a flow-on effect, wait until the prices go up because of the cost of transportation into the ACT. Against these burdens, the minor reductions in income tax will seem like a flea bite.
Canberra does get some joy from the Commonwealth works program, I have to concede, but $3.3m for forward design of the National Museum is far short of the $5m originally promised, and the ACT may well have to increase its contribution if this project is ever going to come to fruition. There is some Commonwealth money for upgrading the Parliamentary Triangle and the old Parliament House, but when you add it all together - York Park was going to produce 1,500 jobs for Canberra, and in the end it produced perhaps a quarter of that - you can see that this is not going to make a massive change. It will be some increment to this Government's falling capital works budget, but it will not make a major impact. It certainly will not create jobs. It might keep a few of the current work force in employment, but it is certainly not going to generate any more.
Ms Follett has her commitment to spending $13m on ancillary work associated with the National Museum. The Federal budget will delay the time when she has to spend that money; our share of it is not in the 1993-94 works program. Maybe the Treasurer has in mind to use some of the increase in reserves that she so proudly announced yesterday, confirming her not as a competent financial manager but as one who squeezed the community for more than she could spend. That is what last year's effort was about. She upped the taxes and upped the revenues and said that she was going to spend it on services, but she did not, and this she claims to be good management.
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