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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 6 Hansard (1 September) . . Page.. 1617 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

They say this Government makes a hell of a lot of mileage out of saying how it is helping small business. I do not see how this Bill is going to help them much. The Government is just whacking another charge on top of enough charges that these people have to bear already. So I am afraid I reject it for that reason as well.

When we talk about how much these poor people have to pay, we are talking about $100 a year. That is a heck of a lot of money to people whose family income is less than $40,000 a year. Most people in this country have a family income of around $40,000 or less than $40,000 a year.

Another thing that absolutely staggered me was the sneakiness of this. In fact, we are talking about an insurance levy which will go to emergency services. The big deal is that we are going to get good emergency services because we are going to get this extra $10m.

In the Estimates Committee I asked the Minister whether it will go to the emergency services. Will it be dedicated to the emergency service so that you can guarantee that the fire truck will be around to put out the fire in your house? The answer was, "Well, not exactly, because in fact the money is going into Consolidated Revenue". I have to paraphrase this because I cannot remember the exact words. The answer was that these moneys will maintain the funding for emergency services. In fact, if you have a look at their budget, last year it was $31m. This year it is going to be $32m. So it has gone up by $1m. I congratulate the Government on their largesse. But where is the other nine million bucks? It is still sitting there in Consolidated Revenue.

People who know anything about government financing would know that every other government program is funded out of Consolidated Revenue. There is nothing special about this levy. There is no nexus between this levy and the emergency services. It is just a furphy and a smokescreen, and people out there, unfortunately, are falling for it, and I would like to tell them that they ought not to.

The big question is this: If the Government does not get the money does that mean that they are going to cut emergency services? Does that mean that they have not got a guarantee of funding? Well, I do not think so. Mr Speaker, it is a bit like the road rescue tax. We were all led to believe when the publicity came out that it was going to fund the fifth or sixth ambulance.

Mr Humphries: It did.

MR HARGREAVES: It did, and I congratulate you on that one, Minister. So why is it necessary to have so much money collected from the road rescue tax when it clearly outstrips the amount for the ambulance? The answer I was given to that question, which I must say tickled me somewhat, is that it contributes to the emergency services in the hospital - accident and emergency. That is the biggest load of rot that I have heard in a long time. It goes into Consolidated Revenue and it could be applied to chopping down trees or any other sort of thing you like to say. It could, in fact, be going to pay for part of the Minister's salary. That is just as logical an argument.

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