Page 2894 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 19 September 2006
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from 2002-03 onwards, if you had not let the public service expand by 2½ thousand public servants—a figure even you were very, very surprised at—if you had paid the attention to detail, as the people of the ACT would expect you to do, you would not need to take some of these measures that you are taking now and add this huge impost on the people of the ACT.
Mr Seselja: Busway designers.
MR STEFANIAK: And some of your crazy vanity projects like the busway. I thought you were not going to go ahead with that, but I got a glossy in the mail from Mr Corbell indicating that this wonderful $150 million nonsense program to save three minutes from Belconnen to Civic is still likely to proceed.
Then there is the use of the recurrent money and even your human rights act costs. Maybe it is not a huge amount in terms of the immediate bureaucracy, but the extra time all the other elements of the bureaucracy have to spend translates into extra staff, et cetera, to accommodate this act that does nothing for the ordinary, law-abiding citizens of the ACT. I mention those few things where your priorities are all absolutely askew. And it is the ordinary people of Canberra who are going to suffer as a result.
An increase in general rates of six per cent is not particularly huge, but that still translates into increases ranging from $63 to $403. Then we get the levies: the $84 fire levy, the abstraction charge of $137 for household water bills—
Mrs Dunne: Which is probably illegal.
MR STEFANIAK: Which is probably illegal; you are right, Mrs Dunne. Frank Pangello is talking about legal action in relation to that. That will leave about a $27 million hole in your budget if that goes west. We are waiting with interest to see what happens there.
Then there is the wage price index. What a great little earner that is—four per cent instead of the 2.75 per cent for the consumer price index. That will further accelerate tax increases and maximise government revenue. It is a cynical attempt by the Stanhope government to maximise its revenues to cover over four years of economic mismanagement. For four years you did not need to do this because you were going into good times. You were left a surplus by the previous government; you had a booming federal economy that just kept going and going and going and getting stronger and stronger. Yet you have somehow managed to get us into this incredible mess. You did not need to.
It is one thing to introduce rates and charges in a prudent, progressive and equitable way, but it really is quite another to slap a raft of levies across the board in a reactionary and panic stricken way in an obvious attempt just to get yourself out of trouble. Many of these increases and rates, charges and levies included in this year’s budget have been cleverly concealed, resulting in household budgets experiencing unexpected additional burdens over the coming years.
I do not think you, as Treasurer, Mr Stanhope, have fully grasped the consequences of this new revenue-raising scheme. We are staring down the barrel of an economic slowdown as high rates and charges eat up discretionary spending. That is going to be
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