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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 1942 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

I believe that it is irresponsible for the Government to be spending $27m on reducing employment at a time when the ACT economy is experiencing three consecutive quarters of negative growth. Over three years, the Government has spent $44.2m on redundancies, at a time when the economy is performing a lot worse than it performed under Labor.

The Government is seeking to rely on ABS statistics to argue that employment is improving, yet the February statistics suggested that this improvement in employment came from the public sector. We have the Commonwealth Government laying off workers and we have the ACT Government laying off workers, yet the ABS statistics for February indicated that there were 3,000 more people working in the government sector than in the previous period. That simply does not hold water. I do not know what is going on with the ABS statistics. I know that they have been changing their methodology and making some other changes, but to suggest to the people of Canberra that there are 3,000 more jobs in the public sector at a time when the Federal Government is laying off staff and at a time when the ACT Government is laying off staff defies belief.

In addition, we have a general problem in the ACT economy. We have retail turnover down, we have people not wanting to spend, we have reductions in employment in the construction industry, we have spending down in the tourism industry and we have business confidence at a record low; yet the Government wants to tell us that this is an economy performing well, that this is the kind of economy in which they should be tipping an extra 1,000 people onto the unemployment queues. I do not think that is a sustainable position, and I think it is an example of the bad priorities of this Government. It is one thing to address these issues in good times, but the middle of a recession is not the time to be laying off 1,000 people, as this Government has done.

The Government in this budget has relied on increases in taxes to help fund its budget - not that it announced them this year; it announced them last year. We have seen a new debits tax and increased imposts on pensioners through reductions in pensioner concessions in particular. We have also seen some rather curious figures in this year's budget papers. We have economic growth predicted in the budget papers and we have a 4 per cent growth predicted in average weekly earnings, yet we are predicting that payroll tax revenues will rise by, I think, one per cent. These figures simply do not add up. The evidence presented to the Estimates Committee does not explain why payroll tax revenues should be so low, given the projections of average weekly earnings, economic growth and employment that the Government has made. It looks to me like a hollow log, so do not be surprised to see in a couple of months' time the Government boasting that its payroll tax figures exceed the budget estimates.

Marketable securities revenue is another interesting one. That revenue is doing far better than was anticipated in last year's budget. I have yet to hear a satisfactory explanation of this. The Government steadfastly refused to say that this is due to people investing their redundancy payments, although they have never denied it when I have suggested it. If indeed this is the case, the further cuts to the Federal Public Service mean that the marketable securities area is again likely to perform well as a revenue item.

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