Page 1200 - Week 04 - Thursday, 17 March 2005
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not control your colleagues. That is what is wrong and that is why we are having this MPI today about the state of the ACT economy.
This morning the chamber of commerce released its latest business confidence survey. For the second quarter in a row, confidence is flat. It is not bounding ahead, as the Treasurer would have you believe. It is not building because people are excited by the return of the Labor government. After two quarters, it is flat. The scary figure is that profits are down.
Where does the money come from for the investment the Treasurer was just calling for? He said that investment is needed, but you cannot have investment when there are lower profits. The problem is that the chamber of commerce report this morning said—and Mr Peters made this point—that, even though expectations were high when they were surveyed about the coming quarter, two successive quarters then turned out to have a flat return.
That means that, if there are no profits there is no investment in staff, there is no investment in plant, and there is no investment in buildings—and that means the government’s revenue goes down. The Treasurer is standing here saying that investment is needed. Investment is needed, but an environment needs to be created where that investment will come from.
Instead, we have a government that spends more, for which we are getting less in services, and tries to portray our call for accountability on pay increases as being against public service pay rises. Public servants have pay rises like everyone else, but you need to call into account whether, at that time, there would be a dividend for the public. We have seen this money just given over without the government negotiating for better services, or more services, for the people of Canberra.
In the last three years we have seen the budget go from $2 billion to $2.6 billion, an increase of approximately 25 to 30 per cent. Has your wage gone up that much? No, it has not. Has inflation gone up 25 to 30 per cent? No, it has not. Inflation is running at about seven per cent across the three years.
We have seen Labor’s almost total dependence upon property-based taxes or transaction taxes. This highlights their lack of ideas and this Treasurer’s inability to get his colleagues to agree that, instead of spending willy-nilly, we have to spend with a plan for the future. There is no plan for the future in this document. As the Auditor-General says, our long-term financial position is expected to rapidly decline—it is not getting better—with an expected shortfall rising by $658 million. Worse than that, in the 2003-04 financial year there was 60 cents in financial assets available to cover each dollar of liability—60 cents in the dollar.
By 2007 under this Treasurer, predicted by the Auditor-General, it is expected that there will be only 34 cents in financial assets to cover each dollar of liability. Where have the assets gone? What have they done with this opportunity? They have squandered the opportunity to drought-proof the ACT economy. At the top of the cycle they have had almost ideal opportunities to do great things, and they have done nothing. They wasted three years putting reports together. We have had the failed white paper. That
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