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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 3 Hansard (27 May) . . Page.. 665 ..

MS CARNELL (continuing):

of course, the Commonwealth grants we have received have been reduced significantly, so we have done that reasonably well. It seems that the Labor Party is really good at doing that. You are good at increasing taxes. You are really bad at decreasing expenditure.

As you can see from the graph with two lines on it, we have our own source revenue and Commonwealth grants. You will see that they crossed over in 1992-93. Since then, unfortunately, we have not been seeing any great increases from the Commonwealth. Maybe there was a little bit over the next few years. The great problem that we have, of course, is our expenditure, and what we are doing with expenditure generally. On the outlays graph you can see that, particularly over the last three years, we have managed to reduce our outlays somewhat. The dotted line is our outlays, from the Commonwealth Grants Commission, and the solid line is the 1990-91 figures maintained in real per capita terms. So we are making some effort, some ground in that area; but I have to say it is not nearly enough. What we have to do is reduce expenditure, and we have to maintain and increase our revenue.

What will the Labor Party do to achieve that? At this stage we still have not heard. I am confident that we are going to. Maybe somebody across the other side of this chamber is going to speak about "Working Capital". It is fascinating that Mr Quinlan got up and gave a whole speech on the operating loss. Well, he did not actually speak about that at all, but he was supposed to speak about it. He did not speak about the whole basis on which the Labor Party was going to run the ACT if they had been elected. I am not surprised that they did not want to talk about that, because the whole basis of "Working Capital" was flawed, as we know, and it was based upon increasing our debt and increasing our operating loss. I would not have owned up to that, either.

Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, we are about to go into another budget, a budget that is extremely important for the ACT and one in which we do have to address our operating loss. We have to address our operating loss in such areas as health, our general expenditure and what we spend to run the city generally. I was hoping, as Treasurer, to be able to sit here today and to listen to all the ideas from everyone in this place on how they would do it.

Mr Berry: Did you get some from Paul Osborne?

MS CARNELL: Actually, yes. Mr Osborne is quite open and has been supportive about reductions in expenditure in the past. The fact is that you people opposite have not been, not in any areas whatsoever. Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, those opposite, when they were in power, put their budget together on the basis of land sales. They increased taxes, they used all the money that was in the bank and they sold off the farm, the land. They are the same people who now have all sorts of trouble at even any minor thought of selling anything else. They are a tiny bit hypocritical, I would have thought.

Over the period since self-government, general purpose funding to the ACT from the Commonwealth Government has reduced by a dramatic 49 per cent in real terms. In fact, one of my graphs, as everyone will be able to see, explains that very well. That is not going to track up significantly. Certainly, we have gone through the pain of

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