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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 5 Hansard (6 May) . . Page.. 1475 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

and education? The business and education sectors already have in place structures that could facilitate such arrangements. Where is there a sign in this budget that the Government has even recognised there might be a valuable brokerage role for it?

Mr Speaker, the budget provides a $10m capital injection to the information technology modernisation program. The Government estimates that 80 per cent of its IT infrastructure needs to be replaced. The Urban Services Committee report on the draft 1999 capital works program recommended that the Assembly be provided with a clear and detailed explanation of the whole IT modernisation program by the end of July 1999. But the budget fails to highlight any intention of the Government to make the modernisation program transparent. Rather, in keeping with a Monty Python theme, the Government seems intent on purchasing every machine that goes "ping". Indeed, InTact are to lose 20 staff through redundancies while undertaking the modernisation program.

Mr Speaker, the Chief Minister has made much of her intention to repatriate $300m from ACTEW to go towards the Territory's unfunded superannuation liability. She trumpeted this in her speech, and triumphed over it yesterday. It is a move that Labor has endorsed, was her claim. Well, yes and no, Chief Minister. Labor did indeed put the proposition during the debate over the Government's proposed sale of ACTEW, a sale predicated entirely on the Chief Minister's insistence that that was the only strategy that could save the Territory from the doom, posed by the superannuation liability, by the way; that it would be viable to repatriate considerable capital from the corporation. But the Chief Minister's transparent budget once again reveals that she does not quite understand the issue or the arguments put by Labor, the Australia Institute and the Assembly's own superannuation committee. My colleague Mr Quinlan will expand on this point.

Mr Speaker, I will conclude by taking perhaps an unconventional perspective. Let us look at the budget from the Government's perspective. What do we see? From the Government's point of view, this should have been a budget written from the comfort zone. It should have been a second-year budget in an extended term; a budget built on the base of a $58m windfall from the Commonwealth; a budget which drew on the realisation, against the odds, of last year's optimistic forecasts; and a budget written in an environment of, in general, favourable economic conditions and outlooks.

This should have been a comfort zone budget that framed a vision for Canberra and detailed a working plan to realise the vision. That is what this budget should have looked like from the Government's perspective. But, of course, this budget has a simple and fatal flaw. It is stained by the character of the increasingly despairing and bereft Government that wrote it. Instead, this is the budget that exposes the Chief Minister and Treasurer. This budget is the emperor's new suit. There is no rabbit for the chief magician to pull out of the hat. The opportunities for smoke and mirrors are somewhat limited.

This budget instead relies on three grounds. First, it relies on the recognition by the Grants Commission that Canberra has been hard hit by Liberal governments on two fronts and that this Government's economic management has not been able to devise a successful fight-back. Second, it grabs the unexpected handout from the Commonwealth, relying on the introduction of a regressive goods and services tax to

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