Page 2619 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 June 2005
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it gave well before the election and just before the election. We will continue to read the fine print of some of this minister’s promises.
MR PRATT (Brindabella) (9.35): In the 2005-06 budget the ACT government has appropriated $67.009 million for the ACT Emergency Services Authority’s operations for the year. In the 2004-05 budget an initial amount of $66.2 million was appropriated, with an additional second appropriation of $1.974 million for increased wages. On top of that we have recently seen additional funds totalling $5.4 million issued in 2004-05 in the form of a number of Treasurer’s advances for so-called unforeseen expenditure. This brings a total ESA expenditure for 2004-05 that we know about—so far anyway—to $73.623 million. That is a whopping 10 per cent budget blow-out for so-called unforeseen expenditure on general insurance, additional security measures at the headquarters in Curtin and overtime for fire brigade staff.
The opposition’s concern is that this budget blow-out may be a breach of the Financial Management Act, given that the ESA’s expenditure has clearly exceeded its budget appropriation for the 2004-05 financial year. It also means that the $67.009 million appropriated in the 2005-06 budget is $6.614 million less than that appropriated in 2004-05. Does this mean we will see another budget blow-out in 2005-06, given that the funds appropriated are less than in the previous year? Will we therefore see more Treasurer’s advances required next year to cover the shortfall?
Those are interesting questions. Not only is the money appropriated in 2005-06 less than in the previous year but we also see the loss of some key projects in the portfolio. Almost $10 million has been withdrawn from the emergency services budget for the construction of joint emergency services centres in Belconnen and West Belconnen. Those projects have disappeared. Funnily enough, by the way, this is suspiciously close to the original $10 million in funding the Chief Minister requires to build his arboretum.
Mr Hargreaves: Don’t you like that?
MR PRATT: While it is not my intention to defeat the appropriation line in the budget, there are major concerns that I wish to bring to the government’s attention and place on the public record. I love the arboretum! I will now look at those concerns in more detail. The latest budget blow-out comes on top of a raft of failings to the emergency services portfolio that are major components of the McLeod inquiry, which the Stanhope government promised to implement after the January 2003 bushfire disaster.
Those failures include the failure to increase funding to ensure the continued rollout of community fire units; the lack of commitment to ensure the continuation of the fire management unit in urban services; the clamp on rural fire services drivers undertaking urgent driver duty; the sidelining of funding for the new ESA headquarters, or at least—and we would favour this option—the provision of a modest amount of refurbishment funding for the existing ESA headquarters at Curtin; and, finally, the reversal of the $10 million for the joint headquarters centre.
The bushfire threat should not be ignored just because the government has become complacent. It is looking suspiciously as if Jon Stanhope is hoping that the community’s memories about the fires and their suspicions that his emergency management regime failed, letting the community down, have faded. Let us have a look at the CFUs. The
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