Page 3325 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 12 October 1993
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public importance?". Well, it is a matter of importance and I will take the next 15 minutes to explain why. I think it cannot be argued that the timing of a budget has a very significant impact on many sectors of our community. Of course, if you are a taxpayer and there are new tax measures, it certainly has an impact. If you are a consumer of services and the value and the nature of the services being delivered are going to change, it has a very significant aspect. So I think there are a lot of people out there in the community who think the timing of the budget is important. I note that the Federal Treasurer thinks it is important, because he has announced his intention to bring his budget forward much earlier than in previous years at the Federal level. I think it can easily be argued that, if it is of advantage for the Federal budget to be brought forward earlier, then it is equally important for us, at our level, to bring ours forward earlier.
I intend to deal with only three reasons why I believe that it is important to the community to deal with the budgets earlier in the financial year than we have done in the past. The first of those has to do with the full-year effect of measures introduced in the budget. There are two elements to that. The first is that, almost invariably, there are at least changes in the existing tax structure, if not new taxes. From the Government's viewpoint, some of those taxes cannot be collected until the Appropriation Bill is passed and the in-principle approval of the Assembly is given to the new tax, if there is a new tax. Then you have to go through the process of getting the enabling legislation to put that new tax into place through the system. So, instead of getting the benefit of the new tax, if it is endorsed by the Assembly, for the whole year, you may get the benefit of it for only a very small part of the year. Clearly, if the tax is a good thing in the first place, it must be better to get it for the whole year than for only part of the year. From the Government's viewpoint, particularly when it sees the desirability of imposing a new tax measure, whether it is to impose a new tax or simply to increase the quantum of an existing one, to get the full effect of that in the year in question could hardly be argued to be a bad thing.
The other side of the coin is when there is a decision to change the way that our expenditures take place, because very often such a change is aimed at achieving savings from the budget measure, whatever it is. A classic case, of course, is the voluntary redundancy packages. The Chief Minister this year hopes, or originally hoped, to spend $17m on redundancy packages with the objective of achieving budget savings in consequence of that expenditure. It is not the first time it has been done. The Alliance Government attempted to reduce the size of the payroll, and the present Chief Minister and Treasurer has attempted to do it in previous years, so it is not new. What we discover in fact is that we rarely achieve the objective that we set out to achieve, because the budget has to be processed and is finally approved round about November. Then you begin the process of putting the budget measures into effect and, particularly with something of that nature, it takes quite a long time.
I believe that it has not taken so long this year to get a lot of people to put their hand up and say that they are willing to go, but you then have to process those applications and you have to consider them in the context of government policy. Are the people that are applying the ones that you want to go, or can you not afford to let them go? And so forth. So the year goes by and to the extent that there were any budgetary savings built into that year's budget as a consequence of such a decision it very often is not achieved. Therefore it must be an advantage to the Government to have its budget brought forward, the whole cycle
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