Page 3207 - Week 10 - Thursday, 16 September 1993
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pay more for their food, more for their clothing, their taxes will go up, their charges will go up, their petrol will go up, but their wages will not go up enough to cover the difference. And this is supposed to be a social justice budget!
The Opposition would not be complaining about some of these increases if the Government were balancing them with restraint in their own spending. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The Labor Government is raising an extra $49.7m in taxes and charges and spending $56m more. This means that, as fast as extra revenue is raised, they spend it. At the same time, they have not addressed the $77m funding shortfall from the Federal Government. This year the Follett Government will borrow $34.4m, which will increase to $57m every year for the next three years. On Ms Follett's own estimates, the ACT will have an extra $200m debt in four years' time. I think an old political saying is particularly apt in this case:
Christmas is the time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell government what they want - and their kids pay for it.
The ACT will be on the debt treadmill. What a wonderful legacy to leave our children!
Madam Speaker, it does not stop there. Hospital waiting lists are growing and public patients are having to wait longer. There is nothing in this budget to address the unacceptably long waiting lists we have in Canberra. In fact, quite the opposite is true. This budget will produce even longer queues at our public hospitals. The Government is basing its budget estimates for health on not having any more patients than we do now. This is simply ludicrous. Have they forgotten that we have an ageing population, growing at 4 per cent? Have they forgotten that more and more people are dropping out of private health insurance, thus placing a higher demand on our public hospitals? Have they forgotten that, even by their own figures, the population is growing by 1.7 per cent a year?
Last year the demand on our public hospitals grew by 5.35 per cent. The year before, it was just over 2 per cent. It is interesting to note that in both of those years Mr Berry budgeted for no increase in activity levels. In both years he was wrong, and he will be wrong again. Mr Berry seems unable to understand that, if you have an ageing population and an increasing population, more people will need hospitalisation. His inability to understand this simple fact means that every year the health budget blows out, and the health budget will blow out again because it is based upon the wrong information. So already, Ms Follett, your budget is shown to be fatally flawed.
One can only assume that Mr Berry has put together his health budget based upon increased waiting lists. If activity levels were kept constant, all that could possibly happen is that more and more people would end up waiting longer and longer for a hospital bed. In Wayne's World, it seems that only those lucky Canberrans who can still afford private health insurance will be assured of hospital treatment when they need it. Last year there was $200,000 in the budget for the establishment of a cardio-thoracic unit.
Mr De Domenico: How much is there this year?
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