Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 3 Hansard (7 March) . . Page.. 766 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Mr Speaker, it is true that this is a backcast for the year, the first full financial year after the Carnell government came to office. Of course, it is possible to argue, as Mr Quinlan has tried to do in the past, that there was a much, much better financial position when Labor was in office, but some sort of dramatic deterioration occurred and that low of $344 million was the product of the Carnell government's mismanagement of the economy and the ACT fiscus.

The problem with that theory, Mr Quinlan, is that you have to go back and look at your own rhetoric during those first couple of budgets brought down by the Carnell government. You will see that what your colleagues were saying during those years-you were not around, of course-was that the Carnell government was ripping the guts out of the Canberra community. It was cutting jobs. It was getting rid of tried and true and trustworthy public servants, to echo what Mr Berry said this morning. It was reducing services. It was being mean and niggardly with the dollars of the ACT community

You have to give us at least a little bit of credit. If we were ripping the guts out of the city, to use your words, if we were cutting expenditure and increasing taxes-that also was another complaint from that period-surely we were improving the bottom line, if nothing else, in that process. Surely we were doing that much. Of course we were. So the figure of $344 million is probably on the conservative side of the size of the accrued loss that the ACT was running at that time. It was probably larger than that amount for 1994-95, that last year of Labor government.

Mr Hargreaves: It's pluck-a-duck time. Pluck another figure.

MR SPEAKER: Order! I warn you, Mr Hargreaves.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, that is the reality. I know this figure rankles with you, Mr Quinlan.

Mr Quinlan: Misinformation rankles with me, Treasurer.

MR HUMPHRIES: I know you would dearly have loved the Auditor-General not to have endorsed that figure as he did in his annual report for the subsequent year. You would love him not to have done that. He is probably off your Christmas card list for a couple of years as a result. The fact is that he did say it and it was the audited result of that year. It was not the product of what we had done. We were busily retrieving the situation by that time. We were reducing expenditure and we were increasing taxation. You have to acknowledge that because you or your colleagues on that bench were saying that very thing at that time.

The position facing the territory was clearly grave. It clearly was a very serious loss situation and today we have a surplus, a real surplus. It is a surplus produced because of those hard decisions that you lot were so anxious to criticise

This morning you raised the question of jobs. How anxious you were to attack the idea of this government doing away with jobs. You know, this terrible Liberal government has reduced the number of people working for the ACT community. Let us say that there

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .