Page 3485 - Week 11 - Thursday, 14 October 1993
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Ms Follett: In six months' time, Mr Humphries.
MR HUMPHRIES: No. The Assembly, if it supported this motion, would reject a 0.5c a litre increase in the price of petrol in the ACT. Yes, that would be the effect of this motion. If the motion is carried - - -
Ms Follett: No; that is rubbish.
MR HUMPHRIES: That is what it says - 0.5c a litre. If we pass this motion we are rejecting the 0.5c a litre. Have you got that much, Chief Minister?
Ms Follett: No; you are wrong.
MR HUMPHRIES: No, we are rejecting a 0.5c a litre increase in petrol. I am wrong, the PSA is wrong, the retailers are wrong; everybody is wrong, except this Government. That is the way it works. The fact is that we are rejecting a 0.5c a litre increase with this motion. If the Government comes back and makes a new determination, later on today even, which winds back that 0.5c a litre increase, which puts that price back by 0.5c a litre, I can guarantee you passage of that measure through this Assembly.
Ms Follett: You goofed.
MR HUMPHRIES: No, no. We get the petrol franchise fee. We get it, and we do not get what we have labelled "Follett's fuel franchise fee" - Follett's iniquitous 0.5c a litre fuel franchise fee. That is what we are getting if we reject this motion today. You know that you can fix any problems with this question with the stroke of a pen, Chief Minister, if you care to admit it. Of course, if you want to make up some artificial barriers for the sake of the consuming public of Canberra, it is all they have come to expect from this Government.
Madam Speaker, the Government simply has to accept the fact that it is hooked into the milch cow of increasing revenue as a way out of Canberra's present financial problems. Its solution to the problems facing Canberra is not to look at the question of expenditure on the part of the ACT Government; it is to look primarily at the question of revenue. This Government knows what the Grants Commission has said about that. Before the last budget the ACT was only very slightly underachieving - if I might use that expression - in terms of revenue collection by State standards. We had only a very small amount of additional revenue to collect before the ACT Government would be collecting at the standard of the other governments of Australia. That is what the commission said. In terms of expenditure we had a big problem. We had a massive problem in that area. That is the area that the Government should have been targeting, to make sure that it dealt with the problem of imbalance between ourselves and the States. Measures like this only increase the dependence of the ACT Government on the revenue side as a way of solving Canberra's problems. It is time you started getting off that question and looking instead at the question of expenditure.
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