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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 2 Hansard (11 March) . . Page.. 637 ..

MS CARNELL

raise an equivalent amount of revenue from the remaining taxes or, to use the obvious extrapolation of his comments, to find progressive taxes that would raise the same amount of money. Those would be, I suppose, taxes such as land tax. It is hard to think what they could be at this stage. I thought it was an unusual approach. Even if we leave aside the taxes that are earmarked for abolition in the national tax reform process, we are still left with Mr Quinlan planning to abolish taxes worth about $115m. To recoup the same amount of revenue from other taxes would mean doubling rates or doubling payroll tax, to give just a couple of examples.

Mr Quinlan also seemed more than a little confused about borrowings. On one hand, he said we should minimise borrowings. Indeed, he said the Government should not force ACTEW to borrow to provide a capital return to the Government. But hang on, Mr Speaker; this is the same Mr Quinlan who is urging the Government to take $300m out of ACTEW as a capital repayment. Does he think that ACTEW has $300m sitting in a bank account somewhere or other that he can just hand on to government without borrowing it? Mr Speaker, I have to say, we wish; boy, do we wish, but it is not the case. The only way ACTEW can make such a capital repayment is by borrowing the money.

Mr Quinlan made an equally inexplicable comment when he said we should be using our AAA credit rating to borrow lots of money, straight after he said we should not be borrowing. I can confirm one thing that Mr Quinlan alluded to. If we run up massive borrowings, our AAA credit rating will certainly be in doubt. Mr Quinlan's other contribution was to suggest that we fiddle the books by picking and choosing which accounting standards we should apply in order to get the budget result that we want. I have to say that we have come to expect these sorts of practices from Labor governments. I would have thought that a former accountant of the year was reasonably keen on using all accounting standards, not just some of them.

The view was that you could get rid of depreciation by not fully implementing accounting standard AS4 on depreciation. I think, as Mr Quinlan said, once we put money into such things as roads and capital works, we should not depreciate that asset. I have to say that that would solve the problem. There is no doubt about that. That would overcome probably very close to all, certainly a significant amount, of our operating loss.

The problem is, Mr Speaker, that the Auditor-General who audits our accounts would qualify probably all of the ACT Government's accounts and, again, I would have thought an accountant of the year would not have been too keen on that approach. Certainly, I am not too keen on having our accounts qualified. I am also not too keen on picking and choosing which accountancy standards we might use this year.

Mr Speaker, I have to say that there is one other way we could overcome our operating loss tomorrow, and that is by taking on board the Australia Institute's approach to the ACTEW sale. Maybe Mr Rugendyke would be keen to know this. Say the ACT Government decided that ACTEW was worth the $1.7m that the Australia Institute suggested it was worth. Say we put into our accounts $1.7m for the actual value of ACTEW, that we use the return on investment that the Australia Institute suggested we should use when they were arguing against the sale of ACTEW, and we also did what

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