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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 1941 ..
MR WHITECROSS (continuing):
payment from ACTEW this year used as ways of disguising borrowings by the
Government to fund their structural deficit. We have also seen the dividend
for ACTEW increase from 70 per cent to 100 per cent of their profit, all this
while the Government claims that this will not have any long-term effect on the
cost of electricity in the ACT. Over the two years ACTEW will be paying the
Government some $305m, ACTEW's dividend payment to government decreases in the
forward estimates. This demonstrates that this is a short-term measure to fund
the deficit. They are not concerned with the long-term impact of this level of
borrowing on the capacity of ACTEW to expand their business or on ACTEW's
electricity and water prices. There is no strategic approach behind this. It
is a short-term measure to raise some money to fund the deficit.
The Government has said that the $100m this year is going to be spent on capital works, but $100m is more than the capital works budget. The Government has not increased capital works by $100m in this year's budget, notwithstanding the $100m they have extracted from ACTEW. In fact, the Government is spending $28m less on capital works than Labor budgeted for in 1994-95. The Government is simply not committed to maintaining capital works spending. They are not really committed to the employment that would go with that capital works spending. They are happy to reduce the expenditure on community infrastructure. Mrs Carnell, just a moment ago, was bleating about depreciation; but she is cutting back on capital works spending, which is how you maintain the value of assets, how you improve the asset holdings of the Territory. The money from ACTEW is, in reality, to patch up holes in the budget. The money from ACTEW is, in reality, to help pay for things like the health budget blow-out, which has happened every year under this Government.
Most seriously, the money from ACTEW will undermine ACTEW as a corporation and its ability to do business. If ACTEW were borrowing $100m to make new investments to expand its business, to expand its profitability, to return additional profits to this community, I would think that was a good thing; but to borrow money just to prop up the Government's health budget seems to me to be a waste and to go against everything that corporatisation of ACTEW is meant to be about. The Government has admitted in the Estimates Committee hearing that ACTEW may have to borrow. In the debate on the corporatisation of ACTEW in 1995, the Government said that it still owned ACTEW. This means that the people of Canberra own ACTEW, which means that the borrowings by ACTEW will in the end be sheeted home to the people of Canberra. They are the ones who are going to have to pay the bill.
The Government's budget for the Chief Minister's Department includes, as in previous years, an allocation for funding redundancies. The Government last year spent $27m on redundancies in the public sector, from the Chief Minister's Department, from the Treasurer's Advance, and from individual agency-funded redundancies. This was substantially more than was allocated in the redundancy pool, substantially more than they told the community they were going to spend on redundancies. Their own figures show that 1,000 jobs have been lost from the public sector in the last financial year. That is more than 1,600 jobs lost under this Government. Agencies have been funding redundancies without any public disclosure of this fact until the Estimates Committee process. Notwithstanding what Mrs Carnell might wish to say about her jobs strategy,
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