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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 1943 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

The Government has budgeted only $15m for this; that is $15m less than they collected last year. (Extension of time granted) Do not be surprised when the Government claps its hands and says that its revenue is doing better than expected. Do not be surprised if this is more money for election goodies in the lead-up to the election, which will be magically funded out of improvements in revenue compared to what is in the budget papers here.

Gaming machine taxes is another area where I would not be surprised to see the Government do much better than they have anticipated in the budget. While they have provided some explanation of falling per machine revenues, the budget projection for revenue from this item also does not seem to me to stand up to scrutiny. It does not take account of additional machine licences that have been issued, and I would not be surprised to see gaming machine taxes exceed the projections. It will be interesting to watch whether we find as the election approaches that there is lots of revenue magically appearing in the monthly financial statements, if indeed we get monthly financial statements. I would not be surprised to see the Government coming up with all sorts of ways of spending the money a couple of months out from the election. Watch for that one, because I think we can be pretty confident it is going to happen.

The Government has shown over the last year some very poor priorities with respect to the Chief Minister's Department. They have been spending huge amounts of money on reducing the size of the work force in the middle of a recession. They spent over $100,000 on a strategic plan that was rejected out of hand by this Assembly, yet they told the Estimates Committee this year - it is in their budget papers - that they do not expect to have their strategic plan completed until June 1998, after the next election. That is pretty convenient, is it not?

Mr Humphries: That is your fault, not ours. You bounced it.

MR WHITECROSS: It is a long time ago that the Assembly last had a look at your strategic plan, and now you are telling us that it is going to take you another 18 months to come up with a proper strategic plan. At the end of three years of Liberal government, we will not have seen any strategic plan out of this Government. The Government has not had any long-term plans on anything else, certainly no long-term plans for economic development in this Territory, and at the end of three years will not have been able to produce a strategic plan. They have spent plenty of money on it, plenty of glossy material has gone out, plenty of bureaucrats have been paid, but there will be no strategic plan until June 1998. That is simply not an acceptable result, and I think the ACT community has a right to be disappointed about the performance of this Minister in terms of strategic planning. She is not committed to strategic planning, she has performed poorly on this issue and, as with her whole approach to jobs, she has let the community down.

I believe that this budget, and particularly the allocation for the Chief Minister's Department, reveal the whole approach of this Government. It is an ad hoc, short-term approach which is all about getting to the end of next week and what is going to be on television tonight, not about real, long-term planning for the ACT. Whether we are talking about the way they address the budget deficit, whether we are talking about the

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