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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 11 Hansard (26 September) . . Page.. 3469 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

Mrs Carnell is planning to reduce her own work force despite the troubling job forecasts. The budget contains yet another $12m for redundancies. How many jobs is that? On an average redundancy payment of $40,000, this is 300 job losses in the ACT Public Service. This is more than the number of jobs Mrs Carnell is claiming will be created through this budget - and she has the gall to talk about jobs and to blame her colleague Mr Howard for his cuts to Canberra's Public Service. The selling and refinancing of government assets contained within the budget will not create one new job. The selling of assets provides no new buildings and no new employers. Mrs Carnell does not have the answers. Mrs Carnell has failed the test on economic management. She has failed the test on jobs.

Not only does the 1996-97 budget not provide any solutions to the lack of growth and jobs, but there are also some very worrying questions surrounding Mrs Carnell's management of the Territory finances. This Government has proven that it is incapable of leading and providing certainty and rationality in decision-making. The much publicised three-year budget is gone. It fell over in just one year. Do you remember Mrs Carnell's "realistic three-year budget"? Mrs Carnell boasted long and loud about it last year, despite Opposition warnings that it was unachievable and would not meet the needs of Canberra. Mrs Carnell's disastrous health budget blow-out is a case in point. Mrs Carnell's embarrassing blow-out and mismanagement of her own portfolio had her crawling back to the Assembly for more money within a year. So much for Mrs Carnell's platitudes at this time last year about her three-year budget having "real, achievable bottom lines that we can live within". Who can forget Mrs Carnell describing forward estimates as "mickey mouse" and "rubbery"; but guess what! They are back. The three-year budget was a triumph of media hype over substance. It was always nonsense to suggest that you could lock yourself into a budget strategy three years into the future. The abandonment of the three-year budget by Mrs Carnell is a clear admission of defeat on behalf of the Government. It is a classic case of Mrs Carnell learning the hard way what everyone else already knew, and Canberrans are paying the price while Mrs Carnell struggles to learn on the job.

Let us look at this budget. How will Mrs Carnell meet the financial management test? This budget is nothing more than a mishmash of minor adjustments that do not address the financial management issues. Instead, she is raising taxes here and there, spending money here and there, adjusting figures here and there, repackaging existing programs here and there, and claiming a surplus which is neither here nor there. The 1996-97 budget is merely a barren accounting exercise that substitutes sleight of hand and smoke and mirrors for real policy proposals. What we got was a much-trumpeted headline surplus of $10m, whereas the real figures point to an ongoing underlying deficit. By selling assets and entering into new types of financing transactions, Mrs Carnell is disguising the real fiscal position of the Territory. The real result is a cash deficit of $98m. In fact, the deficit has gone up, not down. If we look at the accrual figures, it is the same story - a headline reduction in the deficit of $48m, but after taking out a one-off superannuation adjustment it is really a $42m deficit blow-out.

So Mrs Carnell, even in the confines of a narrow accounting exercise, has failed. The 1996-97 budget is not about financial management. There is a significant gap within the budget, minus the asset sales, between expenditure and receipts or revenue.

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