Page 1241 - Week 04 - Thursday, 4 May 2006
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… this budget was more than a horror budget; it was a budget of failure—failure that has characterised this government’s decisions and activities over the past three years or so.
In fact, the failures in simple terms were to have received a substantial windfall of revenue, of more than $700 million, and to have spent that windfall without drought-proofing the ACT economy. “Spend, spend, spend. There goes the credit card. Off we go.” So, with the ACT budget in a parlous state despite the good fortune that has favoured the ACT, what has Jon Stanhope done about this dilemma? He has done three things that we aware of. No 1: he said that he will stare down the budget deficit—a rather novel and untried strategy in Western democracies, I have to say, and perhaps more akin to the actions of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. And Mugabe has decimated the Zimbabwe economy, let us not forget.
No 2: he has instituted a review of the ACT bureaucracy and budget. That is always a good strategy when you do not know what to do, and this government has been really good at commissioning reports. I do not know the words verbatim, but I do recall in 2001, sitting as a government backbencher, how the then opposition—now the government—sitting over here, banged on mercilessly about the amount of money the Carnell government spent on having reviews, consultations and so on. But I think this government have actually well topped that by now.
No 3: he has decided to centralise those functions that are already essentially centralised. That is novel—again, how to make it look like you are doing something when there is nothing to do. And, as we have now discovered, Mr Stanhope is going down the same route as did Rosemary Follett in the early 1990s in establishing a centralised shared services bureau—back to the good old days, I guess! And we all know that the Follett experiment failed.
Mr Hargreaves believes the Liberal opposition is incapable of running a country barbecue. That was said in the ACT Assembly on 4 May 2006. I am left baffled by such a statement after observing how the Stanhope government is incapable of balancing the books of the territory. Quite frankly, the decisions being made by Jon Stanhope now are reminiscent of a person who is not capable of containing rampant and out-of-control spending or indeed fostering control of the territory’s finances. An important question to ask is: how did the territory’s finances arrive at this sorry state of affairs? I recall a comment by the then shadow Treasurer Ted Quinlan in June 2001:
The ACT economy has enjoyed economic growth over the course of the last four or five years. … economy has taken a battering … but it has recovered ... we know that we have a bright future.
Of course, Ted Quinlan could not give credit where it was due. He said that the reason for this good performance was “large slices of good luck”—things that just fell out of the air. He just could not bring himself to acknowledge the soundness and superior performance of the former Liberal government. Then, early in the life of the Stanhope government—in fact in April 2002—we had some economic wisdom from the Chief Minister. In a speech to the ACT business community, he said, “There is no doubt we have the basics right for a healthy ACT economy.” Do you still believe that now?
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