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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2275 ..

MR HUMPHRIES: I promise not to respond to interjections ever again, Mr Deputy Speaker.

MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, not for the next 10 minutes at any rate.

MR HUMPHRIES: Okay, 10 minutes-that is a fair compromise. Mr Deputy Speaker, we have been told that we tax heavily. We do not tax heavily: we tax relatively lightly. We have been told that we have increased expenditure above the rate of inflation. We have not increased expenditure above the rate of inflation. We have been told that we generated the operating loss ourselves. We have not generated that loss ourselves. We have been told that we are not really a private sector town. Mr Smyth has demonstrated we are, in fact, moving fast to becoming a private sector town.

Mr Deputy Speaker, in those circumstances it would seems to me to be foolish to change the economic settings this government has put in place over the last five years. I therefore commend the measures in the budget as a way of continuing this sound economic management.

MS TUCKER (4.42): I covered this area before when I spoke to the appropriations of the Chief Minister's Department. However, I would like to respond to a couple of things that have been said.

I am delighted to hear that we can all relax. All we have to do, Mr Smyth tells us, is walk through Manuka. If we walk through Manuka we can see that the ACT is doing really well. Ms Carnell explained to us that we are better off than anywhere else because an article in the Australian newspaper says so. The article said that the ACT is very equitable. Ms Carnell challenged my questions about how her government addresses issues of poverty and equity. She quoted figures from an article relating to income distribution of $34,000 to $53,000, which were averaged by postcode.

I assume that Ms Carnell and Mr Humphries remember the poverty project that is in place in the ACT. We have a document which tells the story. During the consultation phase responses were received from people who are living on less than $6,000 per year. Also, 60 per cent of the respondents reported that their incomes were between $6,240 and $26,000 per year. This is not nearly as comfortable a statistic as the postcode average incomes which Ms Carnell quoted.

What quoting these figures does is illustrate very nicely the way that the level of poverty in the ACT is hidden. The hidden nature of poverty in the ACT is one of the key features which came out of the poverty task group. Poverty is being hidden partly because of the efforts of our city's early planners to aim for a mix of public housing and higher income houses across the city.

The State of the Territory Report, when you dig beneath the shiny conclusions, reveals some other hidden figures. Over half-51 per cent-of one-parent families rely on government support for their main source of income. Income support from the federal government to ACT people has increased over the last three years. What this means is that we have had an increase in the number of people within our community who are living on very low incomes. This gives us a different understanding than the report's

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