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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (25 May) . . Page.. 1829 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

was happening with these indicators when Labor was in office, when Mr Berry was a minister in a government?" Every single indicator that he mentioned, except for the Floriade fee, was worse when they were in government.

Mr Moore: And getting worse.

MR HUMPHRIES: And getting worse. He said that the teachers' pay rise of 11.6 per cent it had to be forced out of us. How much did the Labor government give teachers when they were in office, when inflation was higher? He talked about cuts to the CIT. What happened to teacher numbers in the school system under Labor? In 1993, 82 teachers were cut, or were attempted to be cut, by Labor. You have to ask yourself: where are these people getting off in telling us how bad things are today?

Let me come to a couple of matters which need to be put on the record. First of all, I concede the point that Mr Quinlan made about total territory expenses being the figures to which I should have been referring in question time-where a 5 per cent increase in expenses was lower than the rate of inflation of 6 per cent. He is quite right about that. But he is quite wrong in saying that the government has not really earned, through the Grants Commission process, credit for the improvement in the ACT's financial position. The argument that has been put is this-

Mr Quinlan: We know this one. This is not opinion-this is fact.

MR HUMPHRIES: No, it is not a fact and I will tell you why. You have said to us, and Mr Stanhope has repeated the argument, that the improvement in the relativities which the Grants Commission decided upon in its 1999 report delivered the ACT that great outcome which has pushed us up into a surplus. In the five-year period to which the figures relate we had the Commonwealth government downsizing and we had bad economic results in the ACT. The averaging of those five years meant that our relativities improved significantly and that is the reason we have got a good return from the Grants Commission.

There is a pretty good argument, on the face of it, to say that the ACT government could not take credit for Commonwealth government cuts to the federal public service, and up to a point you would be right. But the argument falls down when you look at what the Grants Commission actually decided and the extra amounts that they granted to the ACT and how those extra amounts are broken down. The Grants Commission awarded the ACT $19.7 million as a result of relativities improving from below one to above one. These are the mechanical changes that Labor has described. This produced a $19.7 million credit benefit to the ACT from the Grants Commission.

The ACT government's submission to the Grants Commission focused on a much more important argument, and that was changes to the calculation of revenue and expenditure with respect to the ACT. We argued very strongly that all sorts of individual factors, national capital factors, were not properly assessed by the Grants Commission and should be considered differently.

The Grants Commission assessed that the factors that gave the ACT its windfall amounted to $57.4 million. We had a total extra $64 million from the Grants Commission-I think that is the right figure. Of the total credit that they gave us,

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