Page 2708 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
There are 12 teams covering a variety of sports and, instead of $370,000, it is going to be $250,000. It is a minor sum in the sum total of things, but these teams have very little to back them up; they may well not be able to participate. There are some very worried groups out there in sport and recreation. For this very minor amount of money you are intending to save, you are going to cause all sorts of problems. You have got to be smart when you cut a budget. You have got to pick areas where you will actually make some real savings. The two per cent cuts across the board just do not work. You have to target areas. It can be done smartly, but you have not.
This brings me to my final point, and that is the tourism budget. I think even the Chief Minister would realise this, because it was bashed into him by the industry at the business breakfast that we all went to just after the budget: for a saving of $3.5 million, there will be $20 million less coming to government. That is not terribly smart economics. You will save $3.5 million, but there will be $20 million less coming in. That $20 million is not money that would come from ACT ratepayers, the people that have been hit really hard by this budget, the battlers in Spence and Charnwood and Isabella Plains. It is money that would come from outside the territory, and that is surely an area that you would want money to come from.
We do not have primary industry in the ACT. Unlike Queensland or Western Australia, we do not have a mining industry. We have our people power and our knowledge, and we also have tourism, which is a very big money spinner. I was interested to hear some other stats in terms of that false economy to save $3.5 million. There will be 1,200 fewer jobs in all the industries that look after tourism. Those jobs are held primarily by young people who are getting their start in life. That is false economy because 1,200 fewer jobs will mean that less money is spent by locals in our community. As a result of that false economy, over the course of the year there will be 200,000 fewer visitors to Canberra. Those are not my figures. They are from the industry and they have been around since you brought in this budget.
These cuts amount to false economy. You have got yourselves into a horrible state with this budget. You have 2,500 public servants—you did not quite know they existed—more than you need. You could easily justify cutting about 500. The other 2,000 comprise your deficit of $200 million. Where did they come from? You still do not know. You have made blanket budget cuts across the board without any thought going into it. I have picked on just two areas where, to save a few dollars, you will lose a lot of dollars. You will forgo a lot of dollars from the tourism industry and at the end of the day the savings in sport and rec will cost you dollars elsewhere.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (8.56): I seem to recall that during the in-principle stage of the budget debate I quipped that the only thing environmental about this budget was the botanical photograph of the wahlenbergia on the front of the budget box. I think that the more that you look into it, the more it is the case that this budget is, in fact, a complete abrogation of environmentalism by the Stanhope government.
Remember those ads, Mr Speaker, during the last election campaign. They were pretty good ads, actually. I liked them. They said a lot about Jon Stanhope, the environmentalist. Let us looks at the figures. Over the previous three years we have seen drastic reductions in spending on the environment. Specifically, and these are the things
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .