Page 2614 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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As I have said here in relation to the way the Assembly operates and the way in which we have managed our budgets, we should be the cutting edge in this territory. We ought to be an example of good government. We have intellectual firepower in this territory and I struggle to understand why we have been beset with so many problems. Whether Treasury’s advice has just been constantly ignored or whether we are not up to the job with the personnel we have on board, I do not know. I have generally been impressed with the calibre of people I have met on those occasions when I have had briefings.
I acknowledge that the new Treasurer is a lot more reasonable about briefings than was his predecessor, who would not extend me even a single briefing when I became shadow Treasurer. I walked into this Assembly as shadow Treasurer and was denied the most reasonable briefings. All the knowledge I have acquired has been through my own endeavours, with little assistance from the government. I guess Treasury cannot do much about that if they are muzzled. But I believe Treasury must accept some responsibility for the position in which we find ourselves.
I do not think there is an appreciation of how much hurt this budget is going to inflict on people. I do not think anybody has sat down and done the numbers and added up all of these charges across the board such as the licences, the cars, the rates, the revaluations, the water charges—and on it goes. Anybody can rev up the tax regime, but this will inevitably have a set of flow-on consequences. It is the battlers, who I thought the government purported to have some affinity with in electoral terms, that I think are going to really be hurt under these arrangements. It is also going to be a lot about retired citizens who will be hammered. They may have indexed pensions and the like, or even superannuation, but it certainly will not be increasing at the rate the charges and household outgoings are going to experience.
We heard a lot of debate six years ago about GST and the impact it was going to have on those on fixed incomes, but the government is turning around and now, under the ACT taxing regime, hitting those who are disadvantaged without sensitivity to their position, purely on the grounds that we need to charge for services. There seems to be poor fiscal discipline since this government came to office. We first witnessed their Treasurer attempting to justify why a pre-output warning given by credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s in December 2004 was not sounding alarm bells to Treasury in the lead-up to its delivery of the 2006-07 budget.
It defies belief that this government allowed its expenditure to get so out of whack with its revenue that it took a pre-outlook warning by Standard & Poor’s to get it to take corrective measures. What also defies belief is the amount of money devoted to a functional review, the contents of which are still a mystery to everyone outside the cabinet with the exception of the authors and consultants, I imagine, who only serve to offer suggestions of where government might save money that could otherwise be saved through commonsense.
It was revealed through estimates that the Stanhope government chose to spend $350,000 of taxpayers’ money, none of which was used to compensate the leader of the review, Mr Michael Costello, for information that should have been obvious to a generously resourced department such as the ACT Treasury. That is the problem I have with this
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