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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 4 Hansard (25 June) . . Page.. 1098 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

vehicles in the highest category, mainly things like four-wheel-drives. I have not noticed many poor Canberra families driving around in four-wheel-drive vehicles. Pensioners, Mr Speaker, get 100 per cent free registration. That is, I think, a quite significant improvement on the equity available in the budget.

We have had criticism about the ACTION budget, such as that it is unfair that someone going from Charnwood to Daramalan would have to pay more. Unless you have a free bus system you will have to have some people paying more than others. I would have thought that when you travel from Charnwood to Daramalan it is a fairly long way. It is right across town. You would expect to pay more because you are travelling further. That is a concept which obviously escapes those opposite. Mr Speaker, this is not a revenue raising measure as far as ACTION is concerned. It is an attempt to restructure it for fairness. Okay, some members do not like that, but there is no system short of free bus travel which removes all sorts of anomalies and inequities in any such system.

Mr Speaker, Mr Berry made one comment. Mr Berry's speech was the usual class warfare sort of speech we hear every year. You could take any of those speeches and slot them in in any year and they would fit perfectly. It makes no difference what year it is delivered in; it is all the same. There is one comment I do want to mention in this particular year. Mr Berry raised this chestnut about us delivering gifts to our corporate mates. "You hand over money to your corporate mates. We would not do that", he said.

Mr Berry: It is $10.8m, Gary.

MR HUMPHRIES: No, not quite. Mr Speaker, I have checked, and in the time I have had available to check I have found at least two occasions when the Follett Government did deliver quite significant concessions to companies of various sorts in the waiver of ACT Government taxes and charges. There was, for example, a waiver of $44,000 in stamp duty in respect of the merger of two superannuation funds. The clincher, Mr Speaker, was a waiver of nearly $400,000 to the Coles-Myer group for the restructuring of its corporate organisation.

Mr Berry: Never $10.8m.

MR HUMPHRIES: Who were your corporate mates on that occasion, Mr Berry? Whom did you know in Coles-Myer who deserved that kind of benefit? As ever with Mr Berry, Mr Speaker, if you scratch the surface you find hypocrisy lurking beneath.

Mr Speaker, the Canberra Times, I think, summarised this budget very well. I quote from one of the people commenting in the Canberra Times yesterday:

Governments, like everyone else, have more they would like to spend on than they can afford. The Budget is therefore about deciding which areas of spending are more important than others. That's where the vision thing comes in. Beyond the bare bones of matching spending against its revenue base, there is also the need for some idea of what the Canberra of the future will look like.

Personally, I like what I see.

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