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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 1989 ..
MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):
GST from the Estimates Committee. Similarly, the Chief Minister had very few questions at all. There are some assertions-
Mr Hargreaves: You had one from me and you could not answer it.
MR HUMPHRIES: You will get your chance, Mr Hargreaves; just wait, please. We had assertions coming from the committee. Paragraph 2.18 reads:
Budget Paper 3 shows that at a minimum "...there will be a net cost to the ACT of $0.5m in 2000-01, rising to $1.9m by 2003-04".
That is the evidence for saying:
... the GST will cost money from the bottom line, unlike the claims made by the Treasurer to the contrary in the Draft Budget process.
The committee did not know, because it did not bother to ask the question, that that money represents the decision that the government made to give community organisations funding without retaining any embedded wholesale sales tax savings. It was a conscious decision by the government to give community organisations that money. That is not an impact of the GST. That is a decision taken by the government, in effect, to fund community organisations extra money. If you had bothered to ask the question of a minister of the government or an official of the government, you would have found out that answer. Paragraph 2.19 reads:
There is also mention in Budget Paper No 3 that there will be a $13.2m administration cost payable to the Australian Tax Office. The committee believes that it would be fruitful in this budget and future budgets to have a clear reconciliation of the costs and revenues from the New Tax System ...
If members of the committee had bothered to ask the question about that $13.2 million, which they did not, as far as I recall, they would have found out that the $13.2 million is refundable, that the government gets it back in full in its payments from the Commonwealth. There is not, in fact, a $13.2 million cost to the ACT, as would be suggested by the context of that statement.
There is a statement elsewhere in this report that the government does not fund the Welfare Rights and Legal Centre of the ACT. The government funds the Welfare Rights and Legal Centre to the tune of $105,000 a year. Who did that bit of sloppy work, Mr Hargreaves? There was criticism that we need to provide more detail about the capital works process, overlooking the fact that that information is provided separately in the quarterly reports on performance of the capital works program. And so on and so on.
MR SPEAKER: Order! The minister's time has expired. I think it might be an appropriate time to suspend the sitting for lunch.
Debate interrupted in accordance with standing order 74 and the resumption of the debate made an order of the day for a later hour this day.
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