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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 4110 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

no accounting in these figures for the cost of residing in accommodation in government-owned premises, because Mrs Carnell imagines that there is some distinction between leasing a building owned by the private sector and occupying a building owned by the government sector.

Mr Speaker, I wanted to also draw attention to another part of the Government's program for financing their budget deficit, which Mrs Carnell falsely called a budget "surplus". That is the sale and lease-back of the bus fleet. Mr Speaker, it was readily concluded by the Estimates Committee that this was just another piece of borrowing. The result of the borrowing is that ACTION has been saddled with leasing costs of $4m while reducing the cost of servicing its existing borrowings by only $3m, which means that its actual costs of operations have gone up by $1m, thanks to Mrs Carnell's desire to use the bus fleet to help pay for her budget deficit. What a class act! And these are the people who would like to pretend that they are interested in making ACTION more efficient. In fact, they are not making ACTION more efficient; they are saddling ACTION with the costs of financing Mrs Carnell's budget deficit.

It gets worse, Mr Speaker, when you contemplate that the selling price of the ACTION bus fleet is estimated to be in the vicinity of $55m and that ACTION itself has a debt in the order of $55m. But are they using the $55m of proceeds from selling the bus fleet to retire ACTION's debt and to allow ACTION to operate free of debt once they have realised this asset? No, of course not. Instead, the Government is keeping $31m of that money, while leaving ACTION with an ongoing debt of $24m. So, the Government, having ripped assets off ACTION and sold them, instead of using the money to retire debt in ACTION, is using that money to fund its budget deficit. That is the reality of what the Government has done here. They have stolen ACTION's assets to pay for their budget deficit. They have saddled ACTION with an increased cost of operations - effectively, a $1m bill for servicing the Government's debt associated with their $100m cash deficit. So, Mr Speaker, it is not a good record and not a fair treatment of an operation of the Government which Mr De Domenico has claimed it is working to put on a commercial basis.

Mr Speaker, how will ACTION be paying for a $1m increase in its costs? It is going to pay for it in one of the two ways that Mr De Domenico knows to pay for increases in ACTION's costs; that is, they are going to increase fares and they are going to reduce services. Over the past year-and-a-half, while Mr De Domenico has been the Minister, fares in ACTION have been ratcheted up by over 50 per cent and services have been radically cut back - cut back in a way which Mr De Domenico somehow manages to characterise as an improvement.

Indeed, Mr Speaker, the Estimates Committee provided some interesting insights into how the Government can describe cutting services as an improvement in the service. It is pretty simple. This is how you do it: You set a service standard which is worse than ACTION is currently providing and then you reduce the services to the service standard and say, "No, we have not reduced services. We have cut out overservicing. We have not reduced the service, because it still meets the service standard. It is just that there are fewer buses going around. We have not reduced services. It is just that you have to walk further to the bus stop". In fact, Mrs Carnell invented a new one on ABC radio earlier in the year, namely, "We have not increased ACTION's fares.

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