Page 1945 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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longer in a snarling Canberra peak hour, on yet another fireworks display or on a dragway.
The Labor government claims hard decisions had to be made about what our community really needs as compared to what the government provides. This is one of the hard tasks of incumbency. But in assessing these needs the government seems to have limited its thinking purely to dollar terms, rather than adopting the triple bottom line approach to which it has previously said it was committed, which assesses the social, environmental and financial needs of its constituency.
The Chief Minister has a dim awareness that such an approach is desirable. At estimates hearings last year he threatened senior public servants with their jobs if they did not follow the Auditor-General’s recommendations on the use of global reporting initiative benchmarks, but somehow that enthusiasm evaporated when it became obvious that this budget might not be the best one to trial such a system. The mysterious Costello review must have been scary reading.
Jon Stanhope’s instincts were right: triple bottom line reporting would be a useful tool with which to pursue a sustainable future. In taking the economic hard line, the Labor government has abandoned its core value of social justice. I fear that Mr Stanhope’s newly acquired Treasury portfolio and the functional review might have persuaded him to make this move. I am scared that, just as Paul Keating was temporarily blinded by the economic rationalist nonsense coming out of his Treasury, a similar process of absorption might be taking place before our very eyes with the Chief Minister.
The government claims that tough economic decisions had to be made so that the ACT community could realise progressive actions at a later date. Herein lies the weakness of its strategy for, in failing to look after today’s community priorities, we will face tougher social problems down the track. There are innovative responses to the problems this community faces, but this government has not sought them. Rather than rethinking its approach to revenue and spending measures, the government has stuck to the same old formula. Instead of true reform, we have been given more or less the same.
Budgets should start from a broader values base and ask what type of community we want to live in and how government can assist in its development. The ACT government could have used the functional review to determine what ACT residents need socially, environmentally and financially and quarantined those areas or developed them, rather than examining what funding can be cut across the board.
This budget appears to be merely an exercise in following instructions laid down by the functional review. That review could have been a collaborative process. Instead, we are not even allowed to glimpse it. There is no rationale now in keeping it secret. If the Chief Minister and his team really still believe in the fine values expressed in Canberra’s social plan, they ought to have the courage to put their budget guidebook, the full Costello review, on the table and open it up to real social impact analysis.
What is it that Canberrans need that this government has failed to protect? Without asking them we cannot be sure, but we do know that the list would probably include high-quality local education, jobs in our public and community sectors and affordable housing.
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