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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 10 Hansard (23 September) . . Page.. 3552 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

just could not bring himself to acknowledge the soundness and superior performance of the Liberal treasury in government.

Since the Treasurer says that past performance was just good luck, the question we have to ask, therefore, is whether that good luck is continuing to favour the ACT, or whether it has been or continues to be good luck that has positioned the ACT where it is today. I would submit that, while it has not always been good luck that has favoured the ACT, the presence of fortunate circumstances has underpinned the very favourable position in which the current Treasurer now finds himself. It is quite clear that there is little that he or, indeed, his government has done that has placed the ACT economy in such a good position as it is at present.

Indeed, it was the Chief Minister who, in a speech to the ACT business community in April 2002, said, "There is no doubt that we have the basics right for the healthy ACT economy."There was no mention of good luck from the Chief Minister then; rather, an acknowledgment from the current Chief Minister that the former Liberal government had left the ACT economy in pretty good shape. Superimposed on this sound economy has been the recent boom in land and housing activity, which has resulted in a significant and continuing flood of revenue into the government coffers.

Prior to the 2001 election, the Labor Party spent considerable energy explaining how they would, in government, balance the books, clean up cowboy accounting, contain debt, and remove accounting distortions. As an aside, I am not sure what Labor meant by accounting distortions. I would have thought our extremely competent Auditor-General would have uncovered and reported on any such distortions.

What are some of the marks of this Treasurer's period in office? Let me list some of them: a lack of understanding of quite simple economic concepts; the embarrassing withdrawal of the proposed bushfire tax; his failure to implement his flawed proposed rating system; the fiasco of the rapidly yellowing economic white paper; the provision of $10 million from the Treasurer's Advance for supposedly urgent fire safety remediation activities that was not spent in the financial year; the fiasco over the appointment of the chairman of the ACCC; and an apparent arrangement whereby no duty on loan securities would be introduced in the 2002-03 budget, when stamp duty was increased.

Then we had the decision to introduce a loan security duty in any event in the 2003-04 budget and then the deferral of the proposed loans security duty to enable appropriate consultation to take place, creating the need for the minister to withdraw the bill which had been before the Assembly, and the suggestion from both the Chief Minister and the Treasurer that the January 2003 bushfire disaster would cost the ACT millions of dollars and that we would need additional taxation revenue to cover this unexpected cost. Mr Deputy Speaker, that represents quite a sad list, a list of matters that contrast dramatically with the intentions of this government, this Treasurer, to be, among other attributes, open, accountable, reasonable and fair.

Let us consider some of these matters in a little more detail. In my budget reply I demonstrated how this Treasurer had shown that he did not understand quite simple economic concepts, specifically the concept of an economic cycle. I did not want to make a big thing of this issue; I simply wanted to emphasise that our Treasurer is not an economist, and I found it quite extraordinary that the Treasurer had committed the error

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