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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (25 May) . . Page.. 1805 ..

MR SPEAKER: There is no point of order, Mr Smyth, though you managed to fit that in.

Mr Humphries: Mr Stanhope is being accorded the same courtesies as were accorded to me when I presented my budget speech on Tuesday.

MR SPEAKER: Order! I am aware that there were some small interjections during Mr Humphries' speech and I am aware that there have been a few during Mr Stanhope's. I ask, however, that all interjections cease now.

Mr Moore: Mr Speaker, before Mr Stanhope starts, can we have some guidance from you on how we should behave. My understanding of a precedent in this place is that we would normally stay and listen to these speeches. When the Treasurer was giving his speech, Labor members all just wandered off. Can you give us some guidance as to the appropriate thing to do?

MR SPEAKER: I can give you no guidance at all. I simply say that you may do as you wish as long as it is within standing orders.

MR STANHOPE: As I was saying, in many ways this is a budget of lost opportunities. The budget papers show that the government received $83 million more than it expected to have in the current year: an increase in revenue of $45.5 million, an ACTEW dividend of $14.2 million that it was not expecting, and land sales worth $23 million. As recently as five months ago when the draft budget was released there was apparently no inkling of this windfall. So much for our expert financial managers. But do not look for the application of that bonus in the budget papers for 2000-01; it has gone. It has gone in a panic driven rush of blood that ignores the warning signs of a host of local indicators.

Despite the Chief Minister's penchant for leaping to announce the latest favourable indicator, there are signs emerging of a possible downturn in our recent recovery. ABS figures show, for instance, a fall in home lending in the ACT of 11.8 per cent in the March quarter compared with a national average fall of 8.1 per cent. Westpac's Melbourne Institute index of consumer sentiment dropped 2.3 per cent in May, its fourth consecutive fall, taking the total drop since November last year to 16 per cent. The consumer price index rose marginally more in the ACT in the March quarter than in the rest of the country. Food prices have risen more here in the last decade than in any other part of the country except South Australia. Transport costs rose more in the ACT in the same period than anywhere else in the country. Our rate of population growth is the second lowest in the nation, higher only than Tasmania's.

Those are local indicators. One thing territory treasurers cannot do is frame a budget in isolation of external decisions and environments. The territory economy is inexorably bound to the national economy and, through it, to influences from abroad. Interest rates in America and here are on an upward march. Fuel prices are unstable, to say the least. The Olympic boom that has characterised the New South Wales economy and had such an impact on ours is running to an end.

All that is without the goods and services tax-an inherently unfair tax; a tax with inflationary pressures and implications for interest rates, both at a time when the

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