Page 1920 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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than what the fire and emergency services are doing now or, for that matter, programs in other areas of government.
There is a constant pattern we see in this government’s way of doing business. There is a new problem or a new report: “let’s add to it; let’s spend more money”. Nobody ever goes back, it seems, and says, “Let’s look at whether these lower priority areas ought to go.” It is a case of creating a new demand, bringing in a new levy, sort of hypothecating, finding an excuse for this charge, or water, fire, ambulance or whatever, but then it all goes into the melting pot. No-one ever seems to tackle the very fundamental point: why are the essential services of government not met from normal consolidated revenue? Each time there is a particular area of activity which the government feels it can justify imposing a new charge on, away we go and tax our people further.
Mr Speaker, you must be hearing these concerns. I am already hearing them, in the first few days of these new measures being imposed, from people in Canberra who are telling me they cannot afford all these charges. If you look at the horrific list of increases published in the Canberra Times yesterday, suburb by suburb, of course you know that that is only part of the story. They still have not got themselves across the fact that there are many other ways in which new charges are going to find themselves into the household budgets of ordinary Canberrans. They will suddenly find that health insurance premiums, as they apply to people in the ACT, go up because of a 31 per cent increase in the ambulance levy, and the water charges will go up, supposedly for conservation reasons, but there also happens to be another $16 million coming in there.
This is in a territory where people have shown an amazing level of decency and adherence to conservation measures, but they are again being slugged. Basically the money ends up in the ACTEW Corporation and is scooped out by this government to pay for its poor management, its incapacity over a number of years to make sensible decisions in restraining expenditure. These are the very factors that I am well informed were the reasons Mr Quinlan headed out the door here and left the government in such a precarious position on the eve of the budget.
The fact is that this bill should have been referred to, and should be examined in, estimates so we can get to the bottom of what this $20 million is all about, so we can get to the bottom of the reasons why we have had a 63 per cent increase in expenditure on ACT’s emergency services. There may be perfectly plausible explanations, but it is the lack of transparency and the lack of candour on the part of the government that causes me to be concerned about this particular bill. We were told there would be no briefing for the opposition—that is becoming a pattern of behaviour with this Chief Minister—before the bill was brought in, and that it was going to be rushed through the Assembly, all so the cash registers can start ringing to take money out of the community’s pocket.
It is believed it is the government’s intention, according to the budget papers, to impose the levy on all residential and commercial properties at a fixed rate of $84 on residential properties and as a percentage of the unimproved value of commercial properties that exceed $22,000.
The opposition is fully aware that the government has plunged the territory into a very serious financial situation that requires some painful and unpopular decisions to be made, but there are two fundamental questions that need to be asked. The first one, which there
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