Page 1125 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 3 May 2006
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involve a projected budget deficit of $16.8 million for the year 2008-09. Of course parameters change and of course as the cabinet, through the budget process, makes decisions, anticipated outcomes change. As we make a decision, the anticipated operating result or expected operating result changes as a result of the decision.
The cabinet is in the process of making decisions. The cabinet, in making those decisions, always has in mind a base position. The base position on which we build our budget is the position that was delivered through the midyear review. As each decision is made, the outcome reflects the decision. The new projected figures for each of the outyears will be revealed in the budget. They will not be, as you would expect and understand, the figures that are now reflected in the midyear review.
Somebody is incredibly mistaken. Through a series of Chinese whispers that commenced after private briefings, they have continued to the ear of the Leader of the Opposition and have been misused grievously by him, to the point where the Canberra community has simply been outrageously misled about the state of the ACT budget and the issues which this community faces.
Insofar as there has been some mention of the position on health, I do not shy away from the fact—I have said it publicly and it is in the budget documents successively from 2000-01 to 2005-06—that in the last five years, as a result of this government responding to many of the issues which I addressed before on matters that were not addressed by the previous government, expenditure on health has been dramatically increased.
There is an interesting test here for the Liberal Party: identify those aspects of increased expenditure which they now, in retrospect, would not have initiated or which they do not support. I cannot remember a single piece of government expenditure on health that the Liberal Party in this place have jumped up and down about as being unwarranted or too much. I cannot recall the Leader of the Opposition ever saying he wanted a cut to health and he did not want an increase in the level of expenditure that this government has invested in health.
Now we have this embracing position that it is all too much. The test remains: identify that expenditure which you would not have engaged in. You now disown our increased expenditure on disability services. You no longer, to be true to what you are saying, support an increase in expenditure on mental health. You do not believe that the additional resources that we have applied to oncology services for cancer were justified. This is now the Liberal Party’s position: back to taws, back to where you were in government—the lowest level of mental health expenditure in the whole of Australia.
I have been saying, and saying publicly—and I am sure it was part of the briefing which Mr Costello gave—that in the last five years global expenditure on health in the ACT has increased by $220 million a year. We cannot possibly sustain that rate of growth in health. We will continue to increase expenditure on health, but we cannot maintain that level of expenditure.
MR SPEAKER: The minister’s time has expired.
Mr Stanhope: I ask that all further questions be placed on the notice paper.
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