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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (13 May) . . Page.. 1246 ..

MR WOOD (11.27): Mr Speaker, certainly, they are difficult economic circumstances; there is no dispute about that from this side of the house. There is some difference of opinion about the reason behind those circumstances. I note that in her budget speech the Chief Minister said:

The current economic downturn is directly attributable to the massive reductions in both spending and employment by Canberra's largest employer, the Commonwealth.

Mrs Carnell: That is what Access Economics said.

Ms McRae: Mr Speaker, it was nice and quiet before. May I just point that out to you.

MR SPEAKER: Order! It is nice and quiet, and I am enjoying it.

MR WOOD: I point out, too, Mr Speaker, that there had not been an interjection until this moment. It is true that the Commonwealth has created enormous difficulty for the ACT, and I expect that tonight that will continue. The Chief Minister ought also to point out that her Government is not entirely lacking in responsibility and that there were trends evident in Canberra before the election of the Howard Government. Let us not walk away altogether from the responsibility that this Government also has.

Last year the Government covered its very large shortfall, the gap between income and expenditure, by lease and buyback schemes, by sales of government assets which they placed great emphasis upon. We are still looking at the outcome of that through the Public Accounts Committee, to see whether it was the best way to go. The Government then argued that that was preferable to borrowing. Well, we will see about that. I certainly do not believe it was preferable to outright ownership of those government assets and the benefits that that ownership brings to Canberra. Perhaps the lease and buyback did not work as well as it was thought it would, because it has not been pursued this year, despite the claims at the time that we had $7 billion or some fantastic amount of assets to sell if we could sell them all. It has not been pursued this year, and I am quite pleased about that.

Perhaps they have found a better lurk. Perhaps they have found something better to close what is a very significant gap between income and expenditure. Rather than call this the jobs budget, as the Chief Minister did, it really should be called the ACTEW budget. Do you know that ACTEW is contributing about 12 per cent of the revenue derived by this Government - 12 per cent from one corporation? That is a massive hit and does not include the purchase they will have to make of the streetlights in the next year and the imposition foreshadowed for the next financial year. That 12 per cent from ACTEW is a measure of how the Government has failed in this budget. There is a $200m shortfall, a $200m gap between income and expenditure.

The Government seems to have made no ground at all in adjusting to the new financial regime, the long financial regime from the Federal Government to reduce our income.

Mrs Carnell: Mr Berry just said that we had too many redundancies. Are you saying that we should have had more?

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