Page 2191 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 15 August 2006
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Stanhope government is more committed than ever to pressing ahead with ideological pet projects that are costing ACT taxpayers millions of unnecessary dollars, while at the same time cutting services in areas of need.
The Stanhope government is now having to charge taxpayers through the nose to pay the price of its incapacity to formulate and manage a sensibly balanced budget. The residents of Canberra should be very afraid of what this government has done under Mr Stanhope’s leadership. That has become clear through the estimates committee process.
The 2006-07 budget is one of hypocrisy and inconsistency. It is a monster budget. Mr Stanhope’s monsters with bottomless stomachs are being fed cash at an extraordinary rate, while the rest of the community starves and pays the price to help feed Mr Stanhope’s insatiable monsters.
While the committee chair has now tabled the committee’s 2006-07 budget estimates report, I and my Liberal colleague Mr Brendan Smyth do not agree with the committee’s report on many fronts. We were happy to see some of our recommendations adopted. There are some very good aspects in that report, but we say that the report does not go nearly far enough to comment on this government’s failed budget preparations.
For starters, many of the recommendations put forward for inclusion in the committee’s report were predominantly voted out by the Labor members of the committee—as we know, a committee that was stacked by the Chief Minister from the start to protect his flanks, to protect the Labor Party from a committee backlash over what was clearly a very difficult budget for him to sell.
However, the strategy of the Labor Party to stack the committee certainly backfired on the Chief Minister late last week. When a final recommendation was put to the committee by Dr Foskey to recommend against the Assembly passing the budget unless the Chief Minister released the functional review there was a vote, three to three, against the recommendation. Indeed if Ms MacDonald had not scrambled back from New Zealand, aided and abetted by the Labor members’ collapsing of the committee process last Friday, Dr Foskey’s amendment to not allow the government’s budget to pass would have got up, and that would have been a farce.
The claim we have seen in the Canberra Times that the Liberals ambushed the committee process is a sham and, I might add for the record, a damning reflection of the Canberra Times’ incompetent, and perhaps biased, reporting on this matter. Perhaps that paper should get out and scrutinise actions more than it does.
The voting impasse has meant that the Labor Party has not been able to include a recommendation in the committee’s report for the Assembly to pass the budget, as they would like to have done. In fact, it means that the committee is, by default, recommending that the budget should not be passed at all, as the committee has not given the budget majority support.
The Labor government’s attempt to stack the estimates committee has been a dismal failure for them and at least a little bit of a win for the community, who do not deserve to be punished by such a monster budget as the government is trying to pass off on them
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