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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 3775 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

election of Mr Howard, the Government has done nothing. It did defend Mr Howard, I suppose. The early rhetoric from this Government was one of supporting Mr Howard and criticising the Opposition and others for daring to speculate and for being scaremongers. I can remember the responses to some of the questions we asked. But there has been no positive action on the part of this Government.

I have to say that, over time, the Chief Minister's rhetoric has moved to blame Mr Howard and to comment that it is very difficult for her under his policies. It is certainly difficult under Mr Howard's policies. It is equally difficult under Mrs Carnell's policies. The budget has brought about an inadequate response, too late in time. It took aim at jobs. That was the main feature of the budget. It was the right target; but the missile to that target - that is, the budget - fell short of the mark. It fell wide of the mark. It fell well away from the target.

Many of the grandiose claims in the budget are not supported by facts. The unanimous report of the committee makes this point. It says, "The committee was not convinced" and "... there should be no misunderstanding or potential for misrepresentation as to the creation of job opportunities". Ms McRae made some reference to this. For example, there were 50 new teaching jobs, it was said. There are not 50 new jobs. There might be 50 new teachers to replace teachers who are leaving - normal separations - but there are not any additional teachers in our classrooms. There are no new jobs. Yet that was part of the claim of the Chief Minister in adding up something like 2,700 new jobs. There is not one additional teacher in any classroom in the ACT. In my language, that is just sheer misrepresentation. The same thing applies in respect of the graffiti gang. We are going to get people out there cleaning up graffiti. But the actual numbers of people fell short of what was claimed, because these are short-term, part-time jobs. So, in this respect, as in many others, the claims in the budget have not been substantiated.

The budget has been too slow. It has been inadequate to respond to the need imposed by the administration of two Liberal governments with influence over Canberra. Mr Speaker, the Government was not able to balance its budget. It could not do it. It has delivered an economy in Canberra which has left it considerably short in its revenue. In order to find the money, it has had to indulge in a sale of assets. It has funded a $100m shortfall in this way. Again, Ms McRae made it clear that the selling of that proposition was misleading. It is quite clear that $100m worth of assets were going to be sold; but the presentation was false. We were told persistently that this is but 0.3 per cent of our assets. Our assets, the budget says, are something like $9 billion, with a couple of billion dollars of liabilities and a net $7 billion of assets. The claim that this is only 0.3 per cent was presented to us so that it would be seen as no big deal to sell off this amount of property. They said, "We are selling $100m worth. That is nothing. It represents very little in our budget". In fact, it is a very large amount of asset sales. It is a big deal, and no amount of misrepresentation can disguise that.

There is a limit to what can be sold. As a result of the presentation, the committee has recommended that we have a separate budget paper next year, with a statement of the ACT's marketable assets. We want to know those assets with a potential for sale. Of the $9 billion worth of assets, those with a potential for sale are only a small amount, and $100m is a very large part of what is marketable. There was evasion on that point.

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