Page 1894 - Week 06 - Thursday, 5 May 2005
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into ACT’s future policing needs was meant to be released in January this year, but we are yet to see it. We would like to have seen the report before we saw the budget figures.
In conclusion, I feel that the ACT government budget is a mixed bag, and that is hardly surprising. I acknowledge the difficulty of providing a budget that both addresses the real needs of the community and is politically advantageous for the government. I hope that the former has not been sacrificed for the latter. There are good and bad parts to this budget. There seems to be an emphasis on maintenance and very little on vision. There is a focus of ongoing governments to look at the short term and to lack courage to look to the long term. Yes, there are plans that address the long-term sustainability of Canberra, but, unfortunately, as the government has attempted to turn these plans into reality through this budget, the implementation appears to be focused on the area of building and planning.
There are so many more things out there waiting to be done and they are bigger than building and planning. I am talking about the support that we provide to our community, especially the most disadvantaged, to give it a healthier future. I will be using the estimates committee to look between the lines of this budget.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member’s time has expired.
MR MULCAHY (Molonglo) (4.18): This budget is bad news for the people of Canberra. Indeed, the ACT government has done a remarkable job, a superb job, in upsetting nearly every person who takes an interest in the ACT budget. It has managed successfully to put itself offside with nearly all Canberrans, because they can see that they are personally copping the costs of years of profligacy, waste and incompetence by this Labor government. It is quite remarkable that in today’s Canberra Times one of the letter writers who has been threatened with being “squeezed until he bleeds”—that well-quoted phrase of the Treasurer—warns that he will give the Treasurer a bloody nose when the opportunity presents itself. For part of my life I was educated in a Quaker school that extolled the virtues of peace, so I certainly would not condone violence, but that letter does reflect the depth of feeling on this particular budget, which has well been described by The Canberra Times as a “horror budget”.
It is unfortunate that the Treasurer and the Chief Minister are not here to listen to my remarks, as they were so keen to talk yesterday about the $1 million projected operating surplus for 2006-07. I can only conclude that the Treasurer will be very safe with that forecast because he must have plans to leave the Assembly. Nobody could seriously suggest that within this budget figure of about $2¾ billion he is going to nicely land there with a $1 million surplus in the next fiscal year. It seems to me that he has come up with a convenient figure—and one that he does not ever expect to have to defend because he does not have plans to face the music. I suspect that the Treasurer has got plans to be elsewhere and that it is more than likely that the legacy of this bad budget will be someone else’s problem.
It will be unfortunate for whoever has to pick up the relics of the ACT economy, the ACT budget, because, as I said, the government has managed to upset just about every group in the town. Even the far left are upset with this budget. When the Greens slam the government for reneging on its election promises on public housing, the government’s fortunes have really taken a tumble. To make matters worse, the government is accused
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