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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 2 Hansard (9 March) . . Page.. 442 ..

MR QUINLAN

: I told you, "I wouldn't be startin' here, me boy". This, I thought, is not a clever budget; it is too clever by half. In fact, I have to record, it was quite insulting to the intelligence. Let us face it. In this clever and caring budget the Government brought in an insurance levy - an inequitable tax, a burden on the prudent. For example, a particular pensioner came to see me in the last month, having received his second insurance premium, the one for contents. Where he used to pay $250, he now pays $350. The margin goes to the Government, $100, because he insures. He is very tempted, of course, not to insure. The same budget included crazy changes to car rego fees and more inequity. As I said, it was too clever by half, and not particularly caring if equity is part of the definition of caring.

As you can see, the four Carnell budgets have featured overdoses of the customary self-congratulation and hyperbole, certainly more than was wanted. An outstanding and consistent feature has been the willingness to sell assets or to apply capital funds to recurrent expenditures - to reduce the value of Territory assets. Somehow our Chief Minister could still claim that we need to flog off ACTEW to retain its value.

Speaking of ACTEW, the proposal to sell was defeated in this place. There are no proceeds of sale to go into this budget as a result of that defeat. All of a sudden we have doom and disaster. I must congratulate Mr Ian Sharpe of the Canberra Times for a couple of great cartoons, the two whips and the Jekyll and Hyde pictures of Mrs Carnell which described the situation far more eloquently than any of us in this place could do. But now we come to this discussion, debate or stunt because the ACTEW sale failed. But why are we having this debate because the ACTEW sale failed? It was demonstrated through the course of the ACTEW debate that there were alternatives to the sale. In terms of the financing, there is no miracle. Just because we change the form of the asset from an income-earning enterprise to cash does not necessarily mean that we have a huge windfall gain. What we would have had had we sold it was a whole lot of cash lying around and the temptation for the repetition of the short-term expedients that we have seen in the past by an asset sales junkie, our Chief Minister.

Mr Speaker, I think you have to ask yourself: Did we get the full monty on the plans for all the cash that was promised in the ACTEW debate? Were we informed as to all of the Government's intentions in relation to that? Were we to see more of the capital wealth of the Territory used up in operating budgets, cleverly and caringly, of course? I did ask, preparatory to this discussion, for a version of the budget estimates that incorporated ACTEW as sold. I assumed that they would be available because immediately the sale proposition failed there were all sorts of assertions made about what the consequences were. So one assumed that the consequences had been calculated. One assumed that there would not be much bother in producing a couple of statements that showed those differences to the forward estimates, but they do not exist. They were not forthcoming. They do not exist, at least at the official level.

At this point I would make a positive note and congratulate the Chief Minister on the little folder that was distributed with some basic information. I think that distribution is a small beginning and a hopeful start in the sharing of information with this Assembly in an accessible and readable manner. We were asked, within this discussion, to canvass our respective roles in fiscal management. On the respective roles of the Executive and

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