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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 2 Hansard (9 March) . . Page.. 406 ..

MR KAINE

operating account. The Chief Minister says that it will be $90m at the end of next year; we will see. Finally, of course, there is the constraint on borrowing. The Government is not free to borrow whenever it feels like it needs to get more money.

Those have been the conditions under which budgets have been developed for every one of the last 10 years. Nothing has changed; nothing is new. In each of the last four years we have heard from the Chief Minister and Treasurer about how this necessitates hard decisions. How many times have we heard that from the Chief Minister and Treasurer? "We have to make hard decisions and we are prepared to confront the hard decisions". The only problem is that many of the hard decisions have not been confronted.

There may be a new dimension to this year's budget, because the Chief Minister has made much of the fact that the ACTEW debacle has made her budget problem more difficult. I submit that it has not because, in everything that I heard the Chief Minister say about the sale of ACTEW, at no time did she indicate that any part of the revenue would go into the operating account of the annual budget. It was to be used to pay off superannuation, it was to be used to set up a community development fund - I think some of us might have read that as a slush fund - and it was to be used for one or two other things that the Chief Minister had in mind, but nowhere did she say that any part of that money was to go into the 1999-2000 budget. In fact, by not selling ACTEW, she still has the benefit of a dividend from ACTEW which she otherwise would not have had. I know that not selling ACTEW prevented her putting a substantial amount of money into the superannuation fund and provision still has to be made for the superannuation fund; but to some degree at least, if not totally, that can be offset by the dividend that she will still get from ACTEW. So, nothing much has changed in terms of the development of the annual budget.

Of course, lurking behind all of that remains the superannuation problem, and it will remain so for many years to come; but I would point out that the Chief Minister knew for at least three years that she had a pending superannuation problem and her only solution to that was to sell ACTEW. She has acknowledged publicly and her Public Service have acknowledged that they had no fall-back position. If ACTEW was not sold, they had no fall back. It is an error in judgment, I submit, on the part of any treasurer to put all your eggs like that into one basket and then have to deal with the problem when the basket is dropped.

The Chief Minister wants to know from us what she should be doing. I would like to tell her a few things that I do not think she should be doing. She should not be perpetuating some of the things that have been hallmarks of her stewardship as Chief Minister and Treasurer for the last four years. At the low end of the scale in terms of financial implications, we do not want any more futsal slabs. That was a very interesting one. It was unbudgeted, it was costed originally, apparently, at about $80,000, and it turned out at a cost of $200,000. But it was not in the budget. Where did the money come from? Whatever the answer to that is, it cost the taxpayer about $80,000 for a slab that sits down there by the lake and is never used. Is that a good investment? I submit not.

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