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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 2065 ..
MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):
the 2004-05 financial year onwards. In the 2004-05 financial year the ACT will be a net beneficiary of the GST to the tune of $14.2 million, rising in 2008-09 to $70.4 million-this is in 1999-2000 dollars-and in 2009-10 the annual benefit to the ACT, that is, extra money the ACT community will receive from the goods and services tax, will be $93.8 million.
Mr Quinlan: If the economy holds.
MR HUMPHRIES: No. Mr Speaker, I am satisfied that these are conservative estimates of the benefits that the ACT will obtain. If I am still around in 10 years' time, I will be very pleased to sit Mr Quinlan across the table and decide who will eat his hat, depending on how much benefit has actually flowed to the ACT in that time. The total benefit to the ACT over the next 10 years from the goods and services tax will be approximately $269.9 million-$270 million.
If at some time in the course of the next 10 years the Australian Labor Party manages to form a government on this side of the chamber, it is not going to turn that money back to the Commonwealth. Let us be realistic, Mr Speaker: that money is going to come into the coffers of this territory and be used to fund all sorts of new programs and provide all sorts of benefits and returns to the ACT community.
I am certain that, if there is a Labor government in place at some point in that 10-year period, they will not be giving much credit to the GST; but that will be, of course, the source of the sorts of programs that I have just been referring to, that will be the reason that they will be able to hand out largesse to the ACT community in all sorts of new programs. They will describe that as being part of their competent financial management. But I can tell them now, well in advance, that it will be due in no small part to the very considerable revenue flowing back to the ACT community from the goods and services tax.
Based on the funding arrangements agreed to by the Ministerial Council for Commonwealth-State Financial Relations, it is anticipated that for the eight years following the implementation of the new taxation system on 1 July the ACT will be $105 million better off than had the current funding arrangements continued. That is for the first eight years. For the first 10 years it is something like $270 million.
Mr Speaker, I ask the house to pass this legislation on a very simple argument, that is, that we have entered into an agreement with every other state and territory government and the Commonwealth government which obliges us to put this legislation forward to the Assembly for passage and I note that every other state Labor government either has passed this legislation in much the same form or has legislation to achieve that goal on the table already and I imagine that it will pass-
Mr Quinlan: I hope that they did not pass it in this form. It is a shambles.
MR HUMPHRIES: It is in exactly the same form. All we are doing, Mr Speaker, is attaching the intergovernmental agreement to a fairly innocuous and fairly short bill. Members should look at the bill. It is a very short bill. We are attaching the agreement to the bill. That is all we are doing, Mr Speaker, and that is what every other state government, including every Labor government, is doing.
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