Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 4085 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

In fact, Mr De Domenico was so confident that in speaking about Federal public servants losing their jobs he even said, "So what?". They were all going to get jobs in the private sector. Their consistent policy all the way along has been to turn a blind eye to the facts and to try to talk the economy up. There is nothing wrong with being an optimist, but it is no substitute for real economic policies.

I want to touch on a couple of other important issues which cannot be ignored in this debate. One of those is this whole question of assets sales to fund the budget deficit. Mrs Carnell, on the first page of her budget speech said, "There are no borrowings in this budget". No serious economic commentator accepts Mrs Carnell's claim at face value. The reality is that the sale and lease-back arrangements she has entered into are exactly the same as borrowing. They are borrowing under another name.

Mrs Carnell has found this option so attractive not because of any financial responsibility inherent in selling a stream of income as Mrs Carnell did. There is only one reason she has done it. By doing it this way, she is able to put these borrowings into the ledger as income, whereas if they were borrowings she would not be able to put them into the cash accounts of the ledger and she would have to admit that what she really has is a $98m deficit. Not only could she not be accurate in her claims about creating jobs in the budget, not only could she not be accurate about last month's labour market figures; she could not be accurate about something as fundamental as whether the cash budget is in surplus or in deficit.

There is one last thing I want to touch on, and that is the issue of fairness. In this budget there are some new taxes, some new charges, which I think are particularly unfair and which I think this Assembly should be looking very closely at. One of them is a bank account debits tax and a related reduction in the financial institutions duty. The reality of this change is that every time anybody withdraws less than $750 from their bank account they will be paying more tax than they were before, and every time they withdraw more than $750 they will be paying less tax. You do the maths. Who wins and who loses? How many ordinary families in Canberra make withdrawals of more than $750? Who makes withdrawals of more than $750 and is going to win out of this? It is an unfair tax. At a time when charges are going up all over the place, when employment is declining and when unemployment has been rising and has stabilised only because people have given up and left the work force, Mrs Carnell has introduced a new tax which is going to hit ordinary families harder while relieving tax on business people, who are the people who make these big withdrawals? I think the Assembly should take that very seriously when that comes up.

Another interesting proposal that Mrs Carnell has included in her budget ought to be a matter of concern. That is the capping of the general rates concession for new pensioners. What that means is that any new pensioner with rates of over $500 is going to be worse off than under the current rules. What a class act this is! Mrs Carnell has picked out families operating cheque accounts and new pensioners as targets for tax increases. This is on top of increases in fees and charges in the last 12 months of 12 per cent - three times the rate of inflation. When you examine this budget from the point of view of fairness, there is not too much good news about the Government's performance. That is on top of the fact that we have a Chief Minister who simply cannot be honest about the facts of her budget when it comes to either the cash surplus - - -

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .