Page 1575 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 June 2007
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was unexpectedly delivering a surplus. He claimed that this showed that the then Liberal government was a poor financial manager in being surprised by a surplus.
And funnily enough, that is exactly the situation Mr Stanhope as Treasurer now finds himself in. As one newspaper headline puts it, “Stanhope is smiling at surprise surplus”. We had this huge deficit last year that justified the closing of the 23 schools and the huge increase in taxes for ordinary Canberrans and for businesses. Then, of course, we get some more money and we are actually in surplus.
Whichever way you look at it now, Chief Minister—even on the absolute bottom line—we are in surplus again. If you do it properly, it will be $13.5 million, or if you do it the other way, which you have in your budget, it will be $103 million. We are in surplus. As that newspaper headline put it, “Stanhope is smiling at surprise surplus”. You used that as a criticism of the 2000 Liberal budget when finally, after a lot of hard work, we were starting to get the territory into real surpluses.
The government want you to believe this is all about having taken the tough decisions, and they have cut services across the board. They have closed in the course of this current financial year the much-loved library in Griffith. They have closed the government shopfront in Civic, causing many people to have to spend either their entire lunch hour, and sometimes still fail, to do such essential things as go and get their cars registered. The streets and open spaces of Canberra have never looked worse. Despite how you might try to dress it up, people are paying more and getting less under this inept government.
A pall of neglect hangs over this city that never did either in the days of the commonwealth administration or during the days of the ACT Liberal government. Public transport services, which were inadequate before the restructuring of timetables, are now worse than they were a year ago. I am pleased to see at least some attempt has been made to recognise that fact. We will see in fact whether the initiatives you are taking in your budget do improve that situation.
But so many people in this community—50 per cent of people in this community—rely on public transport at some stage or another, and invariably they are the ones who are the least well off. They are the students, they are the people on pensions, they are the people on low incomes. It certainly grieves me to hear stories of people who have great difficulty in terms of how they get to work, for example, as a result of your botched timetables. You seem, hopefully, to have recognised the error of your ways there, and we will see whether your improvements work or whether there is still going to be huge problems.
I turn to our bus interchanges. Our bus interchanges are rife with violence and they are utterly unpleasant places to wait for these infrequent buses. We will see too whether any of your minor initiatives in the police budget will do anything there. It would be interesting to tease out when we consider the estimates—if we can ever get a real answer—just how many police we actually have. Quite clearly, that is an area where, measured against any yardstick, we are short of the national average. It is a force that is stretched in terms of the essential job they do for our community.
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