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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2272 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

surplus in 2000-2001. It was all irrelevant. It made no difference whatsoever. It was just activity in the background and the real work was going on in the Grants Commission." I am sorry but it does not compute. It does not make any sense.

Mr Quinlan also made the comment that our budget is not really in surplus, that the surplus is in fact an illusion because of a change in accounting treatment. He said that the reality is that we are actually $25 million worse off than we are, so really it is a $20 million loss rather than a $4 million or $5 million surplus. That is his view. I stand by my figures. But, of course, there is an arbiter to tell us which of us is right, and his name is Mr Parkinson-he is the Auditor-General of the ACT and he will have to audit and give a verdict on the ACT's accounts.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I am quite willing to come back to this place and offer humble apologies to Mr Quinlan if it turns out that Mr Quinlan is right and the ACT in fact does not have an operating surplus. I hope Mr Quinlan will make the same concession to me if it turns out the Auditor-General takes a different view about the surplus.

Mr Smyth: Mr Quinlan said, "Ditto."

MR HUMPHRIES: He said, "Ditto," did he? That is very good; I am very pleased. I am looking forward to reading the Auditor-General's comments on the ACT budget.

Mr Quinlan made a number of other comments in the course of his remarks. He was basically revisiting old debates here but I will just touch on a few of the things he said. He said the ACT is always better off compared with the rest of Australia, that our unemployment rate has always been lower than in other parts of Australia and so on. That is true up to a point but it is also true to say that other economic indicators such as growth rates and car purchases do not necessarily follow the rest of the Australian trend. In particular, the ACT has shown a habit of being countercyclical in respect of many of those indicators. At times when Australia as a whole has been booming, growth rates have been down in the ACT and vice versa. That has happened on several occasions in the last 20 years. In fact, it could well be true to say that it is more than often the case.

But the fact is that at the moment the ACT unemployment rate is well below the national average and all of the other economic indicators are also considerably better than the national average. They are all consistently better and that is an indication, if any were needed, that the work of the Carnell government has made some difference to the economic position.

Back in 1996 when the present federal government came into office big cuts were made to the federal public service. The opposition screamed, "You people have got to do something about this problem. You people are seeing massive numbers of jobs cut out of the ACT workforce, including the federal workforce, and you've got to do something about that." We did. We went away and we stimulated jobs growth principally through a range of concessions and incentives to the private sector. We created jobs in the ACT that simply were not there before-as members have heard, 13,000 jobs in the space of the last five years.

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