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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 9 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 2615 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

Now that the Federal budget has been brought down, what does the OFM modelling indicate will be its impact economically on the ACT; and is it as disastrous as many believe? Does the Chief Minister still maintain that the figures, particularly relating to job cuts, were outlandish?

MRS CARNELL: Mr Speaker, I think probably the outcome for the ACT has not been unexpected. It is certainly very much in line with what we did expect. It is as tough as we expected it would be. I think one of the things, though, that it really does show is that all the claims of 30,000 redundancies and all these sorts of things were absolutely ridiculous.

Mr Whitecross: Mike Taylor repeated it in the paper on Saturday.

MRS CARNELL: Yes; well, it just shows you what silly things some people will write in newspapers. I am quoting directly from the budget papers.

Ms McRae: No, you were not; you were quoting Mike Taylor.

MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr Wood asked the question.

MRS CARNELL: The budget papers quite categorically say that the number of redundancies that are expected in this financial year, Mr Speaker, is about 10,500. In fact, it is exactly 10,500 over this next 12 months. That is right around Australia, Mr Speaker. At worst, that would run at around about 3,500 from an ACT perspective. My understanding, in discussions with a number of my Federal colleagues, is that a lot of the ACT redundancies have already occurred; so, a lot of the central office rejigging has occurred. It does not make it any easier, Mr Speaker, and it does not mean that we will support it any more than we do. We think some of the approaches that have been taken are, if nothing better, bad management; but certainly comments about 30,000 and so on are way off the side of the graph and certainly not in line with the budget papers themselves.

Mr Speaker, a lot of the problems that occur for the ACT as a result of this budget are quite obvious. First and foremost, of course, there is the $10m reduction in standard funding; there is the $10.4m in Beazley black hole money; and then there are the reductions that will occur as a result of the specific purpose payments reductions. Those opposite would be aware, if they bothered to stay informed, that the States have yet to be fully informed about what we actually have in our SPPs. It would be impossible to have done any modelling because we actually do not have the figures at this stage. Mr Howard gave an undertaking that those reductions would not be more than 3 per cent across the board. Other figures that have been bandied about suggest about 2.5 per cent. I understand that in Health it could be in the vicinity of 4 per cent, Mr Speaker. It is a little difficult at this stage to do any modelling about the impact of the budget without any final and definite figures on SPPs.

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