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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 8 Hansard (25 August) . . Page.. 2389 ..
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, if I can be heard above the rabble - - -
Mr Wood: He could have asked me and I would give him the answer, you see.
MR SPEAKER: Well, he will not have a chance very shortly because you will not be here, Mr Wood.
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, it was with great pleasure that I was present at the National Press Club the other day when the Chief Minister announced that we were to move into a surplus situation in the very near future; that we were to achieve as a government something which no government has yet achieved in the decade since self-government began in the ACT. That, Mr Speaker, is a very important achievement - moving the budget of the ACT genuinely into the black for the first time and eliminating our operating loss.
We inherited from Labor just on five years ago a $344m operating loss. That loss is to be reduced in this financial year to just $9m, assuming the second Appropriation Bill passes. Next year we expect a surplus of $62m, rising to a healthy $110m in 2001-02, Mr Speaker. I do not care which way you look at this news - backwards, frontwards or upside down - it is unquestionably very good news for every citizen of this Territory. Every person who lives in this Territory has much to be glad about on hearing that news. It indicates a capacity as a community to be sustaining and to be sustainable, which surely should be the way in which we proceed as a community in the future.
Mr Speaker, in the last 41/2 years the Labor Party has been opposing every measure that we have used as a government to get to the point where we are now moving, finally, into the black. The Labor Party appears to have opposed every reduction in outlays. The Labor Party has opposed every increase in revenue. As well as that, they have called for us to spend money on a whole range of areas where we have not spent money. Mr Speaker, the ACT community owes very little to those opposite for the fact that today we are in the position where we are very close to achieving an operating surplus for the first time, so it was rather disappointing to see in Mr Stanhope's media release of the other day the following claim:
Mrs Carnell also made some glowing predictions about the Territory's finances over the next couple of years.
The projections are good, but the basis is - as always - missing.
If Mrs Carnell bases her projections on, for instance, the merger of ACTEW and the repatriation of hundreds of millions of dollars by mortgaging the new organisation, then they are optimistic in the extreme.
Well, Mr Speaker, I suppose people who have done their best to prevent the Territory moving to the position where we are in an operating surplus for the first time would be very anxious to find some reason - - -
Mr Stanhope: Table the ABN AMRO report.
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