Page 1936 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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projections, will rise to $900 million or more in the near future. A phenomenal improvement in GST money has been coming into the territory since its inception. The Stanhope government and the people of the ACT obviously should have benefited from that. Certainly the government has had a significant amount—more than it expected—of GST money to use in running the territory.
The government claims that ACT taxes are under the national average by 11 per cent. But it fails to say that this is comparing apples with oranges, because the states’ figures also include local council data as well. And it fails to tell you that the ACT government is trying to double-dip. The Commonwealth Grants Commission gives the ACT a large sum in recognition of its limited tax base and inability to tax the commonwealth. The Commonwealth Grants Commission has done that since the rationalisation of grants to the ACT in the late 1990s.
The government claims that community expectations are too high, as if we, the deluded community, have caviar tastes on white-bread incomes. The Chief Minister warns that, as a community, we have been living on borrowed time and it is now running out. The government does not tell you why ACT services cost more than 20 per cent above national levels. This has got everything to do with inefficiencies, waste and wage rises not linked to productivity. Labor talks about living beyond our means. It talks about that as if it were our fault, not theirs.
The government talks of restructuring, not just any restructuring but restructuring the like of which has never been seen here before. But they do not say that the only reason it has never been done before was that it was vetoed by Labor. It is all very well for the Chief Minister to talk of restructuring—and I agree with him that there have been minority governments until now—but every sensible suggestion of measured restructuring by previous Liberal governments was objected to by the Labor Party. Even things as simple perhaps as closing one or two preschools were objected to by the Labor Party. That has occurred certainly throughout self-government. Labor very much has only itself to blame for some essential restructuring not occurring before, because primarily it vetoed it.
This government, again and again, points the stick at the community as if it were we, the community, who are to blame. It is not the government’s policies, not the government’s poor decisions but the community’s. Their doublespeak extends to the numbers the government serves us up. We are supposed to rejoice because the government has posted an estimated surplus of $120.5 million for 2005-06. This is, according to the Treasurer’s own media release, “a dramatic turnaround” and “no cause for complacency”. This was supposed to be good news, on the basis of the $91.5 million deficit projected on budget day last year.
But nothing in the world of doublespeak and “blackwhite” is ever quite as it seems. Even the Treasurer concedes that the $120.5 million surplus is effectively just a paper surplus, mostly made up of gains from superannuation investment and land sales. It is the product of the Australian accounting standard system, which the ACT government alone amongst governments in Australia uses. As the Treasurer said, the government will be adopting the government finance statistics, or GFS, as its headline budget measure from now on. Under the version of GFS of this government, the deficit next year will be $80.3 million. However, if you turn to page 270 of budget paper 3, appendix E, you will see that the actual deficit will be $147.5 million.
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